IRA AND CLARA GABRIELSON
MAY 31, 1974
BY DAVE MARSHALL
MR. MARSHALL: It’s about 6:20pm and we’re out here at Gabe and Clara’s and having a few
libations before supper. I’m just doing a little recording here. Sitting here right next to me is one
of my favorite girlfriends, Clara Gabrielson! It’s been too long since we’ve been out here Clara.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, I know it has! And it’s worried me; I’ve been wanting to see you
for so long! Finally the other day Ira was in there working away and I said to myself, “well, I’m
not going to say a thing to him, I’m just go call them and they come!”
MR. MARSHALL: Good, I’m glad you did! Well, I’ve been out here two or three times you
know while you were down in Texas and I sat and talking with Cash. He’s awful lonesome you
know.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I know he is. Yes, and it is too bad. You know he hasn’t been well.
He’s only worked one or two days since we’ve been home. We came home about the first of
May. He hasn’t been at all well, and we’ve been dragging around you know. So I don’t know.
Ira says maybe we’d better go and have our water tested. He was concerned that there might be
some kind of infection we were getting. Because since our well was put down, there have been
houses built all around us everywhere. And they all have to have septic tanks. So it could be
infected.
MR. MARSHALL: Well, it wouldn’t hurt to have it checked.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I think we should do that, but we still haven’t though. I don’t know.
I’m afraid Ira worries because he thinks Cash isn’t going to be able to do anything very long.
And really, we need somebody here. If Cash can’t be here, why, somebody else will have to be.
MR. MARSHALL: And it’s going to hard to find somebody to replace him; for reliability and
everything else.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Impossible, I think, because he has come here for twenty years and
worked for a few hours a day. As long as his mother was alive, and then she died he came and
borrowed a spade, a shovel to dig her grave. His brother was here, and he was killed when the
house burned. There are so many other things. Also, Cash was 67 or 68 and he commented one
day that he hadn’t been able to get any Social Security. Ira asked him why. He said he didn’t
know. He just couldn’t get it, and neither could Pearl, his daughter. A lawyer that he’d gotten
couldn’t get it. Ira said, “You bring me the papers!” He did have an Uncle near here. He was
born here near where Dulles Airport is now. He did have an old Uncle who knew the names of
his parents. He knew that Cash had been born there. Ira wrote to the Census Bureau and
Records office, that James Cash Brooks was seven years old in 1910. Ira took that and Cash and
went down to the Social Security Office and got him his Social Security!
MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that nice!
MRS. GABRIELSON: So he just worships the ground that Ira walks on. Do you know that one
year back he gave Ira the check and asked him to go and open a savings account for him? He has
almost $4,000.00 in his savings account now!
MR. MARSHALL: Oh, isn’t that nice! He’s a delightful person isn’t he?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, he is, and he’d just do anything for Ira.
MR. MARSHALL: Tell me about your place down in Texas. You know we’ve talked about it
in the past.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, Jean went down there in about 1947. She has finished that school
downtown on L Street. [Washington, D.C.] It was an accounting school. She graduated with
honors. She was the Valedictorian I guess. Then she found that she couldn’t be a CPA, and
couldn’t take the test even, until she had worked a year in a CPA office. Well, she couldn’t get a
job in a CPA office because they would not have a woman. During the war she had met his boy
who’d been up here. He was an engineer over in Asia Minor. He’d been here in Washington
later. He said that if she went down to the Valley she could get a job in a CPA office. So she
went down there. Of course, she married him and did get a job in a CPA office. But after she got
it, and worked there a while, she discovered she could make more money keeping books than as a
CPA. So she switched and went to keeping books. She married this boy in 1948 I think. Two
years ago, at just about this time of year he died. But before that Jean began to have trouble with
her left leg. She couldn’t manage it. It was just hard to manage. She went to the doctor and they
sent her to Houston and everywhere else, from one person to another. Finally, they said that
there were no two ways about it, she had Multiple Sclerosis. It’s never changed a single bit since
then. But the doctor said that she was unemployable. She cannot keep books any longer. So she
went to work to raise Wire Haired Terriers. And, as a result, she moved out of town so the dogs
wouldn’t bother the neighbors so much. They had rented a place there. Ira had gone down there
for various reasons. When he was in the FWS he as down there buying land for Uncle Sam. He
bought two refuges down there in the Valley. Then, after he left the FWS he went into the World
Wildlife Fund and they wanted some land down there. So much of the brush land in the valley
was being cleared. It was the habit for so many of the birds that come in from Mexico. It is just
across the river you see. Anyway, he knew this place where Jean lived. Of course, we all visited
them when they were down there. He’d go over there because it was brush land and watch the
birds. There were Lichtenstein’s Orioles and Chatchalaca’s and other things that came in from
Mexico only in a very limited area there. One day, we got a telephone call. They said ‘that land
is for sale. There’s nine and third acres’. There had been a divorce in the family and the wife got
that land. She wanted her money out of it. Ira asked how much they wanted for it. When David
told him he says, “Okay, we’ll but it!” Ira called up the lawyer who had been buying WWF land
for him. He asked him to buy that land for him. He did that. So that’s they way we happened
to get nine and a half acres.
It’s largely native brush that grows there naturally. There are trees they call Brazil. There are
Texas Ebony and Texas Persimmon and many others. There lots of Mesquite.
MR. MARSHALL: Describe where it is. You said it’s near Mexico. What’s the town I mail
things to?
MRS. GABRIELSON: It’s La Feria. It’s about 30 miles up the river from Brownsville. I
presume that our place may be 5 for 6 miles from the river. But of course, the river isn’t very
wide there, and the other side is Mexico.
MR. MARSHALL: Well now, you put a trailer down there didn’t you, a mobile home?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, after we bought that land, Jean and David both began to say
‘Why on earth do you stay up there and shovel snow in the winter?’ They said we should come
down and spend the winter here. I said it would cost a lot of money to fix a place for us. David
said we should rent a mobile home for a while. But you can’t do that until you get a septic tank
and until you get gas in and some way of heating. You have to have to have electricity and this,
that and the other thing. Of course I was always finding a reason why we shouldn’t do it. Then,
we got a letter [unintelligible]. Then I told him to find us a mobile home that we could rent.
Well, he had a little problem there. They had had one hurricane through there and people didn’t
rent mobile homes. But he finally found one. He liked them so much that he took Jean with him.
The house they were renting was a big old stone house that a man built. He had no idea of
building. He was not an architect, nor a builder. He built it with wetback Mexican labor that
didn’t know any more than he did. It was built on a slab. All of the pipes and wiring was in that
slab. It was just trouble, trouble; always. Well Jean got tired of that. It was a great big house
too. They didn’t need a big house. She went with him to look at some of these mobile homes.
After they found one for us, they said that they found that they could buy one and pay for it
with less money than they paid in rent every month if they put it our lot. So we said “sure, why
not!” So it was just right up next to a section of the irrigation canal. It has not been filled. All of
the irrigation pipe for the valley is underground. They say they get too much evaporation and so
forth. But that little bit had been let. So they set theirs right here, and ours just across the
driveway. Ours is sixty feet long and twelve feet wide. We have three bedrooms and a full bath.
It’s just all linoleum. Not a lot of work to take care of.
MR. MARSHALL: Well, that’s great isn’t it?
MRS. GABRIELSON: I think so, really.
MR. MARSHALL: And you don’t have to shovel any snow either do you?
MRS. GABRIELSON: No, we don’t have to shovel snow, but we did have three freezes. One
freeze and two frosts. That’s the most they’ve ever had I guess.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s the winter of ’73 and ’74. I think maybe I remember Gabe said
something. He wrote me one letter and mentioned something about that.
MR. GABIELSON: He may have. I think it was in December when we had the coldest weather
but it didn’t last but just a very little while. And it didn’t kill all of the semi-tropical stuff. I’ll
bet you everything is ready. [Referring to the evening meal.]
MR. MARSHALL: [to Ira] We’ve been having a great visit here. We’ve been talking about your
place down in Texas. She’s been telling me all about how it came to be.
MR. GABRIELSON: Don’t believe everything she says, it might not be true!
[Tape skips forward.]
MR. GABIELSON: We’ve had more fun in life than any two people I know.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s great. It sure sounds like it. And you know, there’s so many things
that I want to talk to you about. We started talking about Kodiak Browns, about that bear. I
was thinking, and Jill and I were talking about it the other day. And we’ve had some
conversations about Model Ts. I’d like to talk to you about Model Ts and what Clara’s told us
about her problems with Model Ts.
MR. GABRIELSON: We had plenty of Model Ts. One of the things that always amused me
was that another fellow and I [tape skips] we had a chow box and where ever night overtook us
well, that was where we stayed.
MR. MARSHALL: What period of time are we talking about?
MR. GABRIELSON: This was about 1918 to about 1930.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s magnificent! If you see a color green, it’s true, only because I am
green with envy.
MR. GABRIELSON: We had this thing, and one day we were out near Pineville, Oregon. We
had a crew working up on top of Blue Mountains, which aren’t rugged, but they’re steep. Jim
and I decided that instead of getting pack horses, we’d see if we couldn’t get up there in the
Model T. We had what they called a ruckstel [sic] axle.
MR. MARSHALL: I’ve heard of them but I didn’t know what it was.
MR. GABRIELSON: It’s a very low gear. You could put a Ford up against a stone wall and it
would turn the wheels until it wore the tires out. Couldn’t choke it down. So started up there
and wove our way through the tall yellow pine forest. It was an open, park like forest. We
wiggled our way around those downed logs and up the hill. We got up on top. There was a big
flat, prairie like area and we knew our men were camped there. We started to hunt for them. We
can around a corner of little yellow pines and we came across a Ranger. He said, “How in the hell
did you get this thing up here?” He was on a horse! We said, “We drove it up here”. He told us
he didn’t believe it. I told him, “Well, we’re hear and we sure as hell didn’t carry it up!”
MR. MARSHALL: I think that probably in the history of the United States, one of the more
colorful things, like how cowboys were colorful, in the settlement of the west. But the Model T
had a great part on that same vein.
MR. GABRIELSON: It did. I remember once, I was in North Dakota. Another fellow and I
were driving an old Model T without a top on it. I don’t know whether you know how they
were built or not. They had a cylinder with bands around it with two headers that pulled
together.
MR. MARSHALL: It had three pedals on the floor.
MR. GABRIELSON: We pulled a pedal loose. We broke the pedal on one of those headers. It
was the low gear and we were in some sand. We were trying to cross the Missouri River up near
Sanish [?], North Dakota. We didn’t have many tools. I don’t know why, but we didn’t. So we
finally took the crank case off of that thing. We found a nail and repaired it. We put it back
together and we were camped there for about twenty-four hours. We put it back together and we
made it into Sanish.
MR. MARSHALL: There was something about the Model T. And mind you, I don’t know
much about it. I’ve only worked on a few of them. But there was something about the Model T
that if you could solve the secret of it, you fix it with darn near anything!
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. We used to say that we could fix it with anything; a hair pin or a
piece of chewing gum. It was a very simple piece of mechanism, but it was sturdy. It had about
over a foot of clearance. You could go anywhere with it. We drove it all over the desert. There
were no roads. We’d get into a piece of rocky ground and one of us would walk ahead of the car
and throw the big rocks out of the way.
MR. MARSHALL: Not knowing much, as I say, but having a great love affair with the Model
T; I think probably one of the greatest drawbacks would have been the tires. Because the tires,
and this is my own opinion, but the tires were not as good as the car.
MR. GABRIELSON: They weren’t. We thought we’d do awfully well if we got two to three
thousand miles out of a set of tires. Back in those days, you paid about as much for tires as you
do now.
MR. MARSHALL: The state of the art was way behind.
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, if we got two or three thousand miles we thought we were doing
awfully well for the kind of driving we did.
MR. MARSHALL: Of course the roads were bad but even so….
MR. GABRIELSON: Hell, there weren’t any roads where we went!
MR. MARSHALL: My Dad told me about driving a Model back from California to Minnesota.
I made have told you this story before, but at the risk of repeating…Something happened one
night. They were driving along and something happened. They were stalled and couldn’t fix it.
In the desert as you know, it gets cold as the dickens at night. So they took the kerosene lamps
of the side and put the glass curtains on. The only warmth they had was these lamps. Finally,
they got a little fitful sleep. Then, much to their chagrin, the next morning when the sun came up
they walked up on top of a dune and about three hundred yards away there was a town, which
they didn’t know was there!
MR. GABRIELSON: Once, another fellow and I, Jewitt, were driving our old Ford and we got
stuck.
MR. MARSHALL: Where was this?
MR. GABRIELSON: In eastern Oregon; Klamath Marsh. We got stuck. It was raining like hell
and we just got our blankets out and slept under the car! It was darker than pitch. The next
morning we got up and cut some old jack pines and pried that car out. We then got in to Silver
Lake. We were cold and hungry. And this is one of the funniest things I ever saw. We were cold
and hungry and tired. Silver Lake is a ghost town. It had been quite a town back in about 1912.
There had been some wet years. A lot of people had gone up there and homesteaded. But this
town was pretty much of a ghost town. There was an old hotel there and they still had rooms.
They has a sort of a snack back for a restaurant. That’s all there was. So Jewitt and I went in
there and ordered some ham and eggs. There was a cowboy there. He was sitting there and
finally the waiter brought him out a great big steak. He took his knife and fork and whittled and
whittled and whittled on it. He turned the thing around and whittled some more. Finally, he got
mad. He got up and picked up that steak and through it on the floor behind the counter and said,
“Goddammit, bring me some ham and eggs! This is the third morning I’ve had that steak and I
haven’t gotten a bite off it yet!”
MR. MARSHALL: Gab, it’s good to see you. It’s been too long since we’ve had the chance to
sit down and talk.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, we had a lot of adventures with that old Model T.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah. You know, there was a story in the Reader’s Digest about, oh gosh,
it’s got to be back around 1939 or 1940. It was entitled, “Farewell My Lovely”. I don’t know
who wrote it. But it was really a kind of love story about a Model T.
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. Well I went out to Oregon in 1918. Jewitt was there. He was
already there. He was working on a dam, and I was working on roads. In that country, we
traveled together as much as we could. It was really rough to travel alone. We had some wild
times, and a lot of fun. We used to do something that you couldn’t do with any modern car.
MR. MARSHALL: What was that?
MR. GABRIELSON: There were no roads down the Oregon coast when you got below, oh the
lower third of the Oregon coast. We used to travel it. We’d drive that Model T on the beaches at
low tide. And there were some old wood roads over the mountains. This was mountainous
country where the mountain would stick way out over the ocean. We’d get on an old wood road
and get over that hump and get down on the beach again. We used to travel from [sounds like]
Kokeel clear to California with an old Model T like that. You couldn’t do that with any modern
car in the world. Of course you don’t need to now. They’ve got a good highway down there
now.
MR. MARSHALL: What did you do about getting gasoline?
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh there were little towns where you could get gas. But we always
brought extra too.
MR. MARSHALL: That brings up a point that I’d like to ask. We’ve had our shortage of gas
now but say there wasn’t the organized gasoline facilities around. You really had to plan ahead.
MR. GABRIELSON: There were always gas stations, even then, in the towns. There weren’t
any in the open spaces. We always carried gas and extra oil and extra water.
MR. MARSHALL: If you were to guess, or if you can remember, what kind of miles per gallon
did you get? You couldn’t really…..
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I don’t know.
MR. MARSHALL: No, you could really. Because the miles that you traveled were really
arduous, up and down and around.
MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t know what we got. We were in places where it was hard going.
You ran in low gear all of the time.
MR. MARSHALL: There was no way in the world you could tell.
MR. GABRIELSON: One of the funny things about it was if you got on a real steep area; these
old Fords had nothing but a gravity feed into the carburetor. We used to turn around and back up
the hill!
MR. MARSHALL: That’s right, because that front main bearing was a splash system as I recall.
You’d burn that front bearing out if you didn’t get the oil to it.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, we didn’t get any gas either. The gas tank was on the back end of
the car. The carburetor was on the front end. If you got onto a steep grade you didn’t get any
gas in the carburetor. So we used to turn around and back up the hill!
MR. MARSHALL: Well, these were the days when this country was just expanding with
automobiles and where you drove, as you said, you made your own roads!
MR. GABRIELSON: That’s right. There were old sheep wagon trails where the camp tenders
hauled grub to the sheep herders. We’d follow those where we could. When there wasn’t any
road we just struck off cross country in the direction we wanted to go!
MR. MARSHALL: You didn’t drive any at night did you?
MR. GABRIELSON: No. We camped at night.
[tape paused]
….a big part of it is sage brush desert. It’s great flat areas with most of the high country is
between four and five thousand feet. The desert is up that high. Then there are higher mountain
ranges.
MR. MARSHALL: I know very little about Oregon. I’ve been to Portland, and I’ve flown over
it but I’ve never been on the ground there.
MR. GABRIELSON: I spent seventeen years there. You’ll find my foot prints all over the
state.
MR. MARSHALL: When was it when you first went to Oregon?
MR. GABRIELSON: 1918.
MR. MARSHALL: Where did you go to Oregon from?
MR. GABRIELSON: I was stationed in North Dakota in Fargo.
MR. MARSHALL: What were you doing in Fargo?
MR. GABRIELSON: My headquarters were there, but I wasn’t in Fargo much. I was working
you see. This was during World War I. Mostly I was working…they were trying to make the
Indians grow some corn and wheat and grain on their reservations.
MR. MARSHALL: Now who were you working for?
MR. GABRIELSON: I was working for the Biological Survey, in the Department of Agriculture.
They sent us out there and told us to clean out the Prairie Dogs on those Indian reservations so
they could raise some grain. The Indians did want it. Some of the smart old Indians would take
the grain they were sent and put right around the Prairie Dog holes. The Prairie Dogs would
harvest it!
MR. MARSHALL: What Indians were out there around Fargo?
MR. GABRIELSON: Well they weren’t at Fargo. I was out farther west, but that was the
headquarters. They had an office there which I wasn’t in very often. I was working with another
man who was in charge of the district. I was sent out there to help him. I was a new biologist.
MR. MARSHALL: Were you married at that time?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah.
MR. MARSHALL: Was Clara living in Fargo?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, Clara was here in Washington. We came to Washington in 1915 from
Iowa. I graduated as a biologist and taught high school for three years at Marshalltown, Iowa.
And I taught agriculture too. I got a fellowship at Iowa State University to work for my Doctors
degree, and we had moved down to Iowa State in Iowa City. Clara’s folks lived there at that
time. After I got down there, I got a wire from a fellow by the name of McItee. I had taken the
Civil Service Examination for a biologist and had never heard from them. That wire wanted to
know if I’d take a job as an Assistant Biologist at $75.00 a month, and live in Washington. So I
took it to my major professor and showed it to him. He asked me about it and I told him that I
had taken the exam when I first got out of college, and had never heard from it. He said, “Well,
this is probably it.” I asked him what I should do. He studied it for a while and said, “I’m going
to tell you something. You’ll learn more about the things you are interested in if you take this
job, than you will if you stay here with me.” He was an invertebrate biologist. He advised me to
take it even thought I wouldn’t get a degree out of it. So, I wired back that I would accept it.
And on October 1, 1915 Clara and I landed in Washington with one baby. $75.00 a month from
Uncle Sam Houston, in cash paid on every 1st and 15th of the month. They brought around an
envelope with $37.50 cents in it. It was beautiful.
We rented a room in one of those old houses on G Street wasn’t it first? [Asking Clara]
MRS. GABRIELSON: Well….
MR. GABRIELSON: And were in a little room over a grocery store part of the time, and right
next to the old slate war and navy building there.
MRS. GABRIELSON: The one over the grocery store was on 20th and H Streets. It was over a
Sanitary Grocery. That was a year or two later.
MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t remember if the old house was on G or H Street.
MRS. GABRIELSON: It was right behind the YMCA. There was that YMCA building right
out of the window. And we had a back room which had been built as a butler’s pantry or
kitchen. The butler’s pantry was rearranged to be our kitchen. It has a dumb waiter in it. The
rats used to come in that way.
MR. MARSHALL: The one child you had then was June?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, that was June.
MR. GABRIELSON: We stayed there that winter. In the spring of 1916 I was sent up to
Connecticut to study starlings. So this was when they first really began to spread. They spread
out from Central Park, clear up to the northern limit of Massachusetts. There were little colonies
in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire. Most of them were in Connecticut along the shore and
up the river valley. Clara took the baby and went back to Iowa and stayed with her folks who
lived in Iowa City. And she spent part of the time with my folks who lived in northern Iowa. I
was there from April to October. That was one of the most interesting experiences. I went up
there with a whole list of people who had written in the Bureau complaining about starlings doing
various things. I was supposed to go see all of these people and check on it. When I got up there
the first man I got acquainted with was the Game Warden. He was quite an outdoor man, and
quite an outdoor man. He took me one night to a bird club meeting in Norwalk, CT. I told him
about what I was doing, or trying to do. After the meeting an elderly couple came up to me and
said, “Young man, where are you staying?” I told them I was staying in an old flea bitten hotel
down there. They said, “That no fit place for a young man like you to stay!” The woman told
me she would send her husband down the next morning to pick me up. The next morning he was
there to pick me up. He took me home and they gave me a room and I lived in that room all
summer!
MR. MARSHALL: Is that right!? Do you remember their name?
MR. GABRIELSON: Their name was Merrill. I used that room while I was there; I worked all
along the Connecticut shore, but that room was my headquarters. One Sunday morning this
Warden came and wanted me to go out with him and do something. Under the Connecticut blue
laws I could fire a gun and collect anything. I was collecting starlings to get their stomachs. So I
went out with him. When I came back my suitcase was all packed. He gave me a ticket to Iowa
City and $100.00 in cash. This was Mr. Merrill. He went out and collected it from all the
neighbors. The bank was closed because it was Sunday.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Two telegrams had come. Mr. Merrill knew that I was in Iowa with the
baby. He was confident that there was something wrong or we wouldn’t have sent two
telegrams. One said that June was very ill and might have to have an operation. The next one
said that she had to have the operation and was not expected to live. What did he do, but go out
among all of his relatives and friends and gather all of the money they had. It was Sunday you
see. He bought a ticket and got the reservation for him. His wife packed the suitcase. When he
came in they just handed it to him and took him to the station. It was remarkable.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s remarkable.
MR. GABRIELSON: I spent the whole summer up there working on those starlings.
MR. MARSHALL: Have starlings changed any since that time?
MR. GABRIELSON: Not much. One of the interesting recollections that I have about it is that
starling form summer roosts after the young are hatched. There was an island called Belle Island.
It was really a little island in the Long Island Sound. They put a bridge over to it and there was a
circular drive around the island. Everybody was a millionaire who had a house there facing the
Sound. I remember that they wanted to break up that starling roost. I had all of the millionaires
at Belle Island out there with their shotguns and fireworks and everything, chasing starlings. We
broke it up.
Are they in the Midwest?
MR. GABRIELSON: They are all over the United States.
BETTY MARSHALL: But they weren’t at that time?
MR. GABRIELSON: No. They were started like this. They were brought in to Central Park
by an old German who liked them and released them in New York City. They stayed there. This
was in about 1890, I think. I’d have to check my notes.
MR. MARSHALL: Did they come from Germany?
MR. GABRIELSON: They came from Europe. They are European birds. He released them in
Central Park. They stayed there for years. And then they began to spread. By 1916 when
we…
Ed Conbeck [?] and I were the team that worked on them. He worked New Jersey and
Pennsylvania and the lower part of New York. I worked Long Island and Connecticut,
Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and into the edge of Vermont. I once got as far as Brattleboro,
Vermont. Every two weeks we’d meet in New York City and compare notes. These people I
was staying with; they thought it was terrible for me to get on a train and go to New York
without a suitcase. It was all of an hour or an hour and a half ride maybe. I was supposed to
take my suitcase. I was making a trip!
MR. MARSHALL: They sound like great people.
MR. GABRIELSON: They were wonderful people. I went back to see them every time I went
to Connecticut for as long as they lived.
BETTY MARSHALL: What did they do? What was his business?
MR. GABRIELSON: They were a family that had…part or some of the land that that family
owned was still in the family from the old English land grant. The family had logged it several
times. They had a mill not far from where Merle lived. Of course they were old and retired by
the time I knew them. I suppose he was in his late sixties. They looked after me just like I was
one of their kids. She’d scold me if I got my clothes dirty. And she raised hell if I came in with
my feet wet. One day she got after me. I had been out fishing with him, and came back with a
whole washtub of fish. She didn’t approve of some of things he did. He used to go fishing on
Sunday and she didn’t approve of that. So she got after me for going along. Then, he announced
that he was going to vote the Democratic ticket. She got after me and said, “Now, you talk to St.
John!” He name was St. John Merle. She said, “You’ve got a lot of influence with him. You see
if you can’t [change his mind]. It would be horrible if he voted Democratic!”
MR. MARSHALL: What election was this?
MR. GABRIELSON: This was 1916 when Woodrow Wilson was running.
MR. MARSHALL: You know, we were talking at dinner and speaking of Woodrow Wilson.
You talked about how you went to see the inauguration parade for Wilson’s second term, is that
right? Tell us about that again.
MR. GABRIELSON: We lived right close to Pennsylvania Avenue. The parades always started
down by the Capital on Pennsylvania Avenue pass the reviewing stand at the White House. We
were living just off of 18th Street. It was a cold, windy March day in 1917. We bundling June
up. She was just a baby. This parade came by finally after it had passed the White House and it
would go several blocks beyond that and disperse. One of the funniest shows I ever saw was the
Tammany delegation that came along, from Tammany Hall in New York. There was this great
big heavyset fellow. He had a lot of meat on him. He was carrying great big velvet banner with a
rope on each side with a man holding it out. He had the banner pole stuck into his belt. When he
got around the corner of 18th Street a big gust of wind came up and he took off down 18th Street
going south! I don’t think he hit the ground once in fifty feet! These two guys were struggling to
pull him down. It was really funny.
MR. MARSHALL: A runaway blimp! That brings to mind something. Did Mr. Wilson ride in
that parade?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, well, he did to the White House. No, no he didn’t. Don’t any of
them ride in those parades. They had the reviewing stand with all of the notables; the Senators
and Congressmen.
MR MARSHALL: Well, has Washington changed much in the time you’ve seen it?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, it has changed a lot, I’m not sure for the better. When we lived here
Washington was kind of sleepy southern town. The farmer’s market was where the [sounds like
Enterprise] Building is now.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell them about the cars the old ladies used to ride around in.
MR. GABRIELSON: They had those electric cars. They were around here for years. There
was one here when we came back from Oregon.
MRS. GABRIELSON: They just had this one rod that they would steer it with.
MR. MARSHALL: It seems to me that in one of our earlier conversations you talked about
having built a house out somewhere like Arlington. Where was it?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was in east Falls Church. It was just off of where West Street is now. I
haven’t been by there recently, but somebody built on to that old house.
MR. MARHSALL: What year did you build it?
MR. GABRIELSON: That was in 1917. When June recovered we brought her back here and
were living in the same place that we had been. The Doctor said we had to get her out of doors.
So I knew two fellows in the Dept. of Agriculture, Biological Survey. I bought an acre of land
out there. I promised to pay for it. I bought if for $100.00. I borrowed a little money and
bought lumber. I built the house myself. I went to my boss who was Waldo Lee Macatee, and
asked him if I could have ten days leave. He asked me what I was going to do. I told him I was
going to. I told him I was going to build a house. I had already cleared a little place for it. It was
mostly a grove of Virginia pine. I cut some blocks out of the bigger Virginia pine and set it up on
blocks. On the tenth day we moved what few belongings we had out there.
MR. MARSHALL: In ten days! Wow!
MR. GABRIELSON: Now, I didn’t work union hours. I’d get up and take the first car. We had
an interurban car [train] system then that went way out to Bl… [tape skips] One of the
neighbors helped me a little bit. And Clara would stand around and hand me things. She’d look
after the baby and run errands for me.
MR. MARSHALL: Now let me ask this; you mentioned a car. What kind of a car are you
talking about?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was a Streetcar. Nobody had cars in those days. And there weren’t
any roads to put them on.
MR. MARSHALL: Now, when we need that sort of interurban transportation we don’t have it!
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, after the tenth day, I went back to work. The house wasn’t quite
finished but we had moved in. I had three rooms; a kitchen, bedroom and living room.
MRS. GABRIELSON: One section of the living room was not floored. Do you remember?
There were two or three feet of it that didn’t have any floor.
MR. GABRIELSON: The neighbors came by that first night and helped me lay the rest of it.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I was afraid the baby would fall.
MR. GABRIELSON: After we had moved out there I dug the basement out under the house and
built a foundation under it.
MR. MARSHALL: This house it still standing isn’t it?
MR. GABRIELSON: The last time I went by there it was.
MR. MARSHALL: It’d be fun to go by and take a look at it.
BETTY MARSHALL: Was it like a log cabin?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was a frame house. In those days lumber wasn’t as strict as it is now.
MR. MARSHALL: How did you light it? Did you have electricity?
MR. GABRIELSON: We lighted it with kerosene lamps.
MRS. GABRIELSON: We had a pump and well out in the side yard and [unintelligible]. We’d
go out and pump out own water.
MR. MARSHALL: Let me ask you. Could you remember how deep you had to go to get good
water?
MR. GABRIELSON: I had to dig the well about thirty feet deep.
MR. MARSHALL: Did you do it yourself?
MR. GABRIELSON: I got some help from somebody. Can’t remember who.
MR. MARSHALL: So it was driven, you had a tool to drill down in the ground?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, it was dug by hand.
MR. MARSHALL: So the water level was really quite close to the surface. So to clarify in my
mind; this was in east Falls Church. And it’s near Peacock Buick?
MR. GABRIELSON: West Street wasn’t there then. We got off at the second station after the
East Falls Church Station. It was called it Green Gables. You had to walk through the woods to
get to where we were building our house.
MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that wild!
MR. GABRIELSON: I can’t remember his name but there was a Doctor who had a house right
where we got off the train. East Falls Church then consisted of a grocery store, a railroad station
and a lumber yard.
MR. MARSHALL: You know, actually, if this is the same railroad station that I am thinking of,
there is still a kind of a railroad station there…
MR. GABRIELSON: There was one there the last time I’ve been by there.
MR. MARSHALL: And there’s a lumberyard not too far from there. It’s quite possible that it
could have been an offshoot of that original lumberyard.
MR. GABRIELSON: That big old railroad station had been there for a long time. I don’t know
if it’s there or not. I don’t travel that way much anymore.
BETTY MARSHALL: Isn’t Dunlauren farther out?
MR. GABRIELSON: Dunlauren wasn’t there then. We did get on the trolley once and go out to
Bluemont.
MR. MARSHALL: Where is that? The name rings a bell.
MR. GABRIELSON: It’s up on the edge of the Blue Ridge. It was a sort of a resort.
MRS. GABRIELSON: There was an old, old, railroad.
MR. GABRIELSON: The old railroad went first through Falls Church and then Vienna. There
was a little station here in Vienna for years. I don’t know whether it’s gone now or not. The
building is still there, but they don’t use it anymore.
MR. MARSHALL: Now, you’ve talked about using this transportation out from Washington to
where you were building the house, and then you’re talking about taking the same transportation
out to Bluemont. The thing that has concerned me for quite a long time; and we’ve only been
here since 1960 but that’s fourteen years. Here they had facility and that capability way back
then. And the even had it, as I understand it, during the Civil War. They had this sort of
capability. And now, when we need it they took it out! This doesn’t…I can understand it.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I’ll tell ya. There’s a lot of stories, and I don’t know how true they
are; but I do know that around New England where they had an interurban system that covered
all of Connecticut. When I was working up there in 1916, and stayed in Hartford or Norwalk, I
could get on an interurban car and go out into the country and start walking and collecting and
catch another interurban car after I’d walked five or ten miles, and go back into Norwalk. The
whole country was a network of them. The stories up there were that the railroad bought them
up and closed them down. Some of the big banks did too. Morgan and Company was one of
them that was blamed the most for it.
MR. MARSHALL: They just eliminated the competition.
MR. GABRIELSON: The stories I heard up there, and I have no verification, is that these
bankers would go out and buy these interurban roads for a song and then they’d sell, at a big
price, to the New Haven Railroad. They busted the New Haven Railroad.
MR. MARSHALL: Earlier you and I were talking about Model Ts. It strikes me that in
previous conversations, Clara has been telling us about some experiences she’s had with Model
Ts. I’d like you to think back and if you can remember some of those things you told us. There
was one time when you had a problem with a ground plug on a Model T. Can you remember
that? Tell me a little about your experiences with it will you?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, there isn’t much to tell. I learned to drive a Model T in about
1917. It was the first car I ever drove.
MR. GABRIELSON: It wasn’t that early I don’t think.
MRS. GABRIELSON: It was that summer that I was back with the baby and you were in New
England. Rush taught me to drive.
MR. GABRIELSON: That was 1916.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I never drove very much. In later years Ira got a car, but it had no started
on it. You had to crank it. If it was a cold morning I’d take a tea kettle full of boiling water out
and lifted the hood and poured the boiling water over this manifold. Then, I’d go round front you
see, and pull the choke out and crank it.
BETTY MARSHALL: Well, wouldn’t the water crack the engine?
MR. GABRIELSON: No the water would heat the engine up enough so the gas would vaporize.
BETTY MARSHALL: I was thinking that it would crack the metal.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well cars nowadays don’t have manifolds. They are much more
complicated.
MRS. GABRIELSON: One time, when I went out to crank, somehow the crank was loose from
the rod that would turn the motor. I lifted the hood and looked in. I saw the holes that
corresponded with this rod, and there was a pin that held it in there. Well, the pin wasn’t there.
So I put a nail in there and away I went. When I parked downtown, the fellows noticed that and
laughed about it. They thought it was funny.
MR. MARSHALL: A minute ago you were talking about the ground plug, and I am reminded
about something that you and I talked about a number of years ago. There was something about
how if you didn’t have a connection you couldn’t get the darned thing to fire.
MR. GABRIELSON: There was a magneto post.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, that’s what I was talking about.
MR. GABIELSON: It was set into the top of the crank case. I remember the first time I learned
about that was when I was driving in North Dakota. It wouldn’t start. So I carried my suitcase
in to Pierre, South Dakota.
MR. MARSHALL: How far?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was ten or fifteen miles. I got a guy to go back out there with me and
get the damned thing started again. Before he tried to start it again he took off this thing and took
a cutter pin off of the end of it and then it cranked all right. So after that, if anything went wrong
with the car I always took the magneto post out first to see if it was all right.
MR. MARSHALL: Let’s get on with where you two met. Did this take place down in Iowa?
MRS. GABIELSON: Well, I was in Church and I was the music. I played the organ and led the
singing.
MR. MARSHALL: What church was this and what town?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was a Methodist Church in Webb, Iowa. I think it was 1907.
MRS. GABRIELSON: We courted for quite a few years before we were married. I tell you, I
was about 18 at the time. It was very small town, and a little Church. For a time, they weren’t
able to support a Minister. For a time the minister from Sioux Rapids where he lived, came over
there on Sunday and conducted the Service in the afternoon. My parents were pillars of the
church and he always came to our place for a meal afterwards. He told us that there was a family
by the name of Gabrielson who were moving up there. They were going to be a mile and a half
out of town. They had three boys and they were fine people.
BETTY MARSHALL: You can just hear the girls say, “Fine boys, whoopee!”
MRS. GABRIELSON: Eventually I spotted Mr. and Mrs. Gabrielson. They were seated in the
back seat of the church. I knew who they were because I knew they were coming. Then one
Sunday there was a young man sitting between them. After the service, his mother introduced Ira
to me. And the first topic of conversation was about a picture that I had taken of the editor’s
daughter’s school. She was teaching at a one room country school and she asked me to go out
and take a picture of her children. That was the first topic of conversation!
MR. MARSHALL: Can you remember what kind of camera you used?
MRS. GABRIELSON: It was a box camera I guess. Sears Roebuck had advertised a whole
outfit. You got the camera and the plate holders and extra plates. You also got the equipment to
develop and dry and fix and print your own pictures. That’s what I used.
BETTY MARSHALL: You never had to the powder flash did you?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, no flash powder. That was available, but not for the general public.
MR. MARSHALL: So after his mother introduced you, what happened then?
MRS. GABRIELSON: I don’t know. My father decided that there was some sort of feeling
between us and he says, “Now listen daughter, I want you to understand, your mother doesn’t
want any young men hanging around!” Mother was pregnant. It was just two weeks after my
16th birthday that my brother arrived. The first Sunday after that, Ira asked he if might walk me
home. Now, bless you, we had little narrow sidewalks you know. We’d come to an alley, and
there were just two boards about that wide. Eventually he put an arm around me.
MR. MARSHALL: To keep you from falling on that narrow board!
MRS. GABRIELSON: The first time he ever asked me to go anywhere he asked me to go to
Merrison which was about ten miles away, to go to the 4th of July celebration. Well, there were
no cars you know. So that meant we had to go with the old horse and buggy; Old Buck was the
horse. He’d plod along. It takes time to travel that way. I asked my mother if I might go and
she said, “Well, yes, you may go if Cora goes too.” Cora is my sister. Ira has insisted for many
years that he made Guy take Cora. Guy is Ira’s brother.
MR. MARSHALL: Now let’s have Gabe pick up the story from here.
MR. GABRIELSON: I reasoned with Guy and the four of us went.
MR. MARSHALL: A double date! And this was in what kind of a rig?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was an old surrey type buggy. It was my dad’s.
MR. MARSHALL: Did you have to con him into letting you take it?
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh no, we drove it most any time we wanted to.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell how you used to come down and see us at night.
MR. GABRIELSON: Old Buck learned the way down there pretty quick! We’d work all day
on the farm and were pretty tired. We’d fall asleep coming into town and Old Buck would go
through town and pull up in front of their house and stop!
MR. MARSHALL: So actually, this double date thing started pretty early in the game didn’t it?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Oh yes.
BETTY MARSHALL: How many years did you court before you got married?
MR. GABRIELSON: We didn’t get married until after I got through college. I had just graduated
from high school when I came up there. I stayed out of school for a year to help dad on the farm.
MR. MARSHALL: Where was the farm?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was just a mile and a half outside of Webb. It was 160 acres. It was a
general Iowa farm. We raised corn and oats and hay. We fed the oats and hay to the horses and
used to corn to fed the hogs. It was a general farm.
MR. MARSHALL: What county was this in?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was Clay County, Iowa. Sioux City is about 100 miles north. It’s right
up close to the Minnesota line. There was only one county north of Clay county before the
Minnesota line.
MR. MARSHALL: What town in Minnesota would be familiar? Would in be Worthington?
No, that would be pretty far.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, there were no big towns in Minnesota then. You’d have to get up
quite a ways before you’d find anything. I remember there was a little place, but I can’t think of
the name of it. We were right south of the Okoboji Lakes.
MRS. GABIELSON: When we were married we spent our honeymoon at Okoboji Lakes.
MR. MARSHALL: Here we are in May of 1974 and we are getting to the period of the year
when we have a lot of thunderstorms; can you remember if there were any violent storms then?
MR. GABRIELSON: Lot’s of them.
MR. MARSHALL: This has pretty much a characteristic of that area hasn’t it?
MR. GABRIELSON: Always, every since I knew anything about it, and I grew up there. We
had lots of thunderstorms. And we had a lot of hail storms, and the occasional tornado.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I can remember sitting in the schoolroom and seeing a tornado going
around.
MR.GABRIELSON: I can remember as a small boy being at Church one Sunday afternoon for a
meeting and one of those hail storms came up. There were chunks of hail as big as my fist. They
busted every window on that side of the church that the storm was coming from.
MR. MARSHALL: Now, you were courting Clara, and your brother was courting her sister.
Then, you left to go to college. Where did you go?
MR. GABRIELSON: Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. Its south and west. It’s right at
the junction of the Missouri and the Big Sioux Rivers.
MR. MARSHALL: We used to go through all of the time going from Ardmore, OK to
Minneapolis. One thing we always thought interesting was a bridge there that had iron railings
and it made a special noise when you went over it.
MR. GABRIELSON: It goes across to a little town in Nebraska.
MR. MARSHALL: What did you take in college? What did you major in?
MR. GABRIELSON: I majored in Zoology.
MR. MARSHALL: What year did you graduate?
MR. GABRIELSON: I graduated in June of 1912. After I graduated I got a job teaching Biology
as Marshalltown, Iowa High School. I taught there for three years. Clara and I were married that
summer of 1912. I had worked my way through college, and as soon as I finished and got a job,
why, Clara and I got married on August 7th of 1912. The teaching job started in September of
1912. We moved to Marshalltown, Iowa and we lived there for three years while I taught high
school.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Here’s where Ira finally decided that if God had intended for him to be a
teacher, He would have built him different.
MR. GABRIELSON: I applied for a fellowship down at the University of Iowa and got it.
After we had moved down there, I got a telegram from the Biological Survey wanting to know if I
would accept the job as an Assistant Biologist at $75.00 a month and come to Washington.
MR. MARSHALL: What kind of place did you live in while you were in Marshalltown for
those three years?
MR. GABRIELSON: For the first year we lived in a single room in a private home. Well, it was
a two room apartment in a private home.
MRS. GABRIELSON: They fixed it up.
MR. GABRIELSON: The last year we were there we rented a furnished house. It was Old Man
Manning’s place.
MRS. GABRIELSON: That was the year that June was born.
MR. GABRIELSON: She was five months old when we came to Washington.
MR. MARSHALL: Let’s go back now to 1916.
MR. GABRIELSON: I spent most of 1916 working in Long Island, Connecticut and Rhode
Island on the Starlings. We built the house in Washington in 1917.
MR. MARSHALL: So let’s pick it up from there. After you got the house built…
MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell them about the scientists. They laughed so much. They couldn’t
believe that he could build a house. They were scientists strictly. Every weekend some of them
would come out. They wanted to come and see where we were living.
MR. MARSHALL: There men were from the Biological Survey?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, from the Survey. They wanted to see what kind of a place he had
built. They never failed to be shocked by the things that June would say. I remember one time
we were walking along and the editor was with us. He said, “There June, what’s that bird?” And
he thought she’d just tell him it was a “birdy”. She said, “That’s a [scientific name in Latin]!
MR. MARSHALL: That must have really floored him!
MRS. GABRIELSON: Each one of the scientists was specialized on a different kind of species
or bug or animal. Ira had found a big scarab beetle. There was a big hatch that that year. Finally
one day when someone was out, June called out, “Hey Daddy, there’s another [scientific name].”
She was only two and a half!
MR. GABRIELSON: I collected all, or most of the [bugs] in America were collected on our
screen door! This species had been described and were very scarce. All of a sudden there was a
big hatch right there.
BETTY MARSHALL: How many times did this happen?
MR. GABRIELSON: Never again, it happened just that one year.
BETTY MARSHALL: I was wondering about that because we do have the seventeen year
cicadas. That was really something to experience. I enjoyed it.
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, it comes every seventeen years. There are some of those bugs
every year, but the big hatch is every seventeen years. I’ve seen it twice since we’ve lived on
this place.
MRS. GABRIELSON: The scientist soon learned that I had chickens. I’d fix chicken for dinner.
I remember one time when Ira was gone. We were living out in the woods really and there were
raccoons and opossums around. My chickens were young. It was the season of the year when I
had some young ones around. They didn’t go into the chicken house and roost where they
should have. They’d stay out in the brush. I used to have to go out and pick them up and throw
them in you know. One time I did that and accidentally broke the leg of a chicken. Well, I just
thought that’s too bad to let that chicken live that way. So I took and cut its head off and cleaned
it and dressed it and cooked it. After that, June used to beg me to break another chicken’s leg.
BETTY MARSHALL: What happened to your third brother? Weren’t there three boys in the
family?
MRS. GABRIELSON: There was Gabe and Guy and the younger one was Rush. He still lives
in northern Iowa. He became cashier and then President of a bank. He now has retired. He sells
insurance.
MR. MARSHALL: Guy eventually married your sister didn’t he?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, they have always lived in New Jersey. They were married in 1918.
They lived there until she died last fall. Guy is still there.
MR. MARSHALL: Oh that’s right. I had forgotten that she has passed away.
BETTY MARSHALL: How many children did they have?
MRS. GABRIELSON: They had two; a son and a daughter. The son is now President of
Nicolette Asbestos Company. They do a lot of traveling. They own property in Columbia.
Guy had two or three companies. He had Nicolette and they made this water heater down here.
I can’t remember the name of the company. After Guy met Cora, he went to the University of
Iowa and finished there. Then he went to Boston and went to Harvard, and finished Harvard
Law and School of Oratory. He also went through the Business Administration studies.
MR. GABRIELSON: Dad sold the farm. My younger brother was there but he wasn’t very
strong. He was more like mother’s folks. He wasn’t big and hulky like Guy and I were.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Dad Gabrielson went and bought that bank in Crystal Lake.
BETTY MARSHALL: Is that where Rush went?
MR. GABRIELSON: That’s where Rush is now. He’s not in the bank any more. He sold his
interest in it. He still lives in it.
MRS. GABRIELSON: He still owns the bank building.
MR. MARSHALL: He’s married. And he’s got a boy and two girls. The boy has never been
right. He’s had some sort of mental trouble ever since he was a baby. He died some years ago.
He had to be in an institution for years.
MRS. GABRIELSON: The two daughters now live in New Jersey.
MR. GABRIELSON: One daughter does. The other daughter lives in Minnesota. She went to
New Jersey but she didn’t stay. Dorothy is married to a fellow who is a football coach in Wells,
Minnesota. Its a little school, but they’ve won the state championship every once in a while.
MR. MARSHALL: I think that name rings a bell. Now, let’s go back a little bit. You had gone
back to school again, but left and came to Washington. Then you went to Portland for a number
of years?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, we were here in Washington for three years, from October of 1915 to
the summer of 1918. Then, because of the war, I was to go out and fill a vacancy they had in the
Dakotas, trying to control prairie dogs. I went out there, and then I got ordered to take over
South Dakota. I was in the Black Hills in Rapid City I think it was, looking for a place to live.
Clara was at my Dad’s in Crystal Lake. I got a telegram from E. W. Nelson, who was Chief of the
Bureau, wanting to know if I would go to Oregon instead of setting up an office in South Dakota.
They had some trouble out there. I didn’t know anything about Oregon except where it was on
the map. So I called Clara and asked her if she was willing to go out there and take a stab at it.
She said yes, so I called Nelson, or sent him a telegram. I told him, “I don’t know anything about
Oregon, but it can’t be any worse than South Dakota. I’ll take a chance at it.” We landed in
Oregon about three days before Christmas. I went up to Fargo and checked out my stuff to
[unintelligible] and then they told me to stop in Boise and get some information about the rodents
that I was supposed to work on. I stopped there, and while I was there Clara and June both
came down with the flu in that 1918 epidemic. We were staying in a hotel. I couldn’t get them
into a hospital. The hotel people tried to throw me out. I wouldn’t go. They finally agreed to
let me stay if the doctor would come up the back elevator. They finally got so that they could
travel and we got on the train and went to Corvallis, Oregon. We got to Portland. It was
snowing like hell when we passed over the Blue Mountains near LeGrand, Oregon. When we got
to Portland it was raining. I got them into a hotel right close to the station. They had these
interurban trains all over western Oregon, and the next morning we got on the interurban. It was
just three or four days before Christmas. It was a very short time, I don’t really remember. We
got out of that car downtown, and the roses were in bloom all along the street. We had left Fargo
when in was about forty below. We decided right then that Oregon was okay. We went down to
Corvallis and lived there. I worked out of the Extension Service office for about six months.
Then we moved up to Portland and moved into the Service office. There were two people there
besides myself. Stanley Jewitt who was working on predator animals, and the Game Warden.
There were three of us. We had a little office in the Post Office building. We stayed there for
seventeen years. During that time, I worked mostly as rodent control problems, finding out how
to control rodents. We did an awful lot of research work.
MRS. GABRIELSON: They didn’t know what rodents were there. And nobody knew. And
they didn’t know how to control them.
MR. GABRIELSON: We used poisoning and trapping to try and control them. We tried
everything. We developed a lot of the methods that were used for years before they developed
some of these modern ways. One of the things that we stopped was this; all of the grain farmers
up there were using phosphorus on wheat. They were killing all of the songbirds. They were
killing everything. This was being done by the farmers. We got a combination of strychnine and
oats. The small birds won’t eat oats very much, and strychnine doesn’t kill birds very much.
Any bird that’s got a crop is pretty near immune to strychnine. Chickens are immune. You can
hardly stuff enough strychnine into a chicken to kill him. So we got the farmers to change. My
biggest job was to get the farmers to use that. We used to go out and do demonstrations. We
used to tricks. One of the funny things was that we found two ground squirrels that had
different feeding habits. One of them would pick up a grain of oats and take the shell off before
he put it in his mouth. The other one would pick up a dozen of them and stick them in his cheek
pouches. The paste that we put it on with would dissolve and kill him before he ever swallowed
it. So, we devised a brittle flour paste for the one that shelled it. He shelled off enough. I used
to go out and tell the farmers that I’ll kill the big squirrels, but I won’t bother the little ones. Or,
kill the little ones and not the big ones. I’d use the oats with the starch paste on. The big ones
would pick it up and you’d see them eating it. They’d run around and have a good time. The
little ones would die. They were two different sizes. Then I’d say, “Now, we’ll kill them both.”
I’d put out the flower paste and get both of them. The farmers were very much impressed.
BETTY MARSHALL: Are squirrels rodents? They don’t go up in the trees?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, they are rodents. They don’t go up in the trees at all. They burrow
in the ground. There were enormous numbers of them. We couldn’t find a grain field in Oregon
that didn’t have a big swath eaten into it by the ground squirrels that had their nests along the
fence rows.
BETTY MARSHALL: Do they vary much from a chipmunk?
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, they are much bigger. They have many, many species. Some of
them are very pretty animals. Some are not, but they have dozens of species of them.
BETTY MARSHALL: They’re not blind like a mole?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, they burrow and have their nests in the ground, but they do they’re
feeding and all of their running around on top of the ground. They feed during the day. They are
not nocturnal; most of them. There are some that are, but most of them are not.
MR. MARSHALL: How long did you stay in Oregon?
MR. GABRIELSON: We stayed until 1935.
MR. MARSHALL: Then what happened?
MR. GABRIELSON: I got a telegram from Ding Darling who was the Chief of the Bureau. He
said that he had completed his reorganization of the Bureau and it meant a new assignment in
Washington for me, and that he hoped I liked it.
MR. MARSHALL: What did you tell him?
MR. GABRIELSON: I came damn near telling him to go to hell and quitting the Bureau! I liked
it in Oregon!
MRS. GABRIELSON: By that time he had become Regional Director. He was in charge of the
all of the work of the Bureau in Washington, California, Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. He had a
little empire of his own. They didn’t have money enough to go out and check on him.
MR. GABRIELSON: I was running the show all by my lonesome. I came near telling him to
forget it. Sometimes I thought the worst decision I ever made in my life was to come back east.
MR. MARSHALL: Well, I don’t know. If you hadn’t of come back east, we wouldn’t have got
to know you probably.
MR. GABRIELSON: I came back here in 1935 in February as assistant chief of the Research
Division. I don’t think I ever worked at it. I had an office there. Darling would come and say to
me every once in a while, “Here, I want you to do this.” It has nothing to do with my work. He
sent me on all kinds of crazy stunts. He called me up one morning about nine o’clock and said
that he was in trouble. “I’ve got a conflict.” I’m supposed to be at the White House at ten
o’clock and I’m supposed to be in front of some damned House Committee. He said, “You’ll
have to go before the Committee. I asked him, “Well what Committee is it?” He said, “I don’t
know, you’ll have to find out!” I asked him what they were talking about, he said he didn’t
know that either. So, I had to find out, and finally did. I couldn’t think of what I was going to
say in the taxi on the way up there. But I got by because I knew more about it than the
Committee did.
BETTY MARSHALL: Would you know what year Mount Rushmore was carved out?
MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t remember. I remember when it was built. I was in the Black Hills
in 1916. They hadn’t started working on it then. It was in the 1930’s sometime.
MR. MARSHALL: When you came back to Washington and were working for Ding Darling,
where did you live then?
MR. GABRIELSON: I rented a room for a little while from one of the fellows in the Bureau
because Clara and the kids were still out in Oregon.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I stayed there until the girls were out of school.
MR. GABRIELSON: She drove east by herself.
MR. MARSHALL: In a Model T?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, in a Model A.
BETTY MARSHALL: How many kids did you have then?
MRS. GABRIELSON: I had four.
[End of tape 1]
MR. GABRIELSON: I had been given another job. Ding called me in one day and said, “I got
$35,000.00 from the American Wildlife Institute and $30,000.00 from Congress. I want you do
go out and set up some cooperative wildlife research units. I asked him, “what’s a cooperative
wildlife research unit?’ He says, “I don’t know, you’ll have to do find out!” Then only think I
knew about that was going on anything like it was out in [unintelligible]. So I went out there and
talked to those fellows and found out what they were doing. I also found out the kind of courses
you have to have to train wildlife people. I started out. First, I tried to put the nine units we had
money to finance in different ecological areas so we could take full advantage of it. The original
idea was that we’d get several states to contribute money to it. That never worked out. The
state laws won’t let them. I found out ways to beat it, but that was much later. I started out to
set up these units, and I was up at Oreno, Maine setting up a unit up there when Clara was
driving east. I met her at Guy’s house in New Jersey after I had finished setting up the unit in
Oreno. What I had to do, it seems now that it would be impossible, but it worked. I had to get
the State Agricultural College and the Game Department to join the old Biological Survey, and the
American Wildlife Institute which was the predecessor of the Wildlife Management Institute to
meet together and agree on a program to finance it jointly.
[tape skips]
MR. MARSHALL: This is May 31, 1974. On Side two we had just begun talking about how
Ding Darling had told Gabe to go out and establish a cooperative wildlife unit. We’re going to
pick up at that point.
MR. GABRIELSON: I had to set up nine of them. I had seven up them set up and Virginia was
one of them; out at Blacksburg. I had packed my suitcase and bought a ticket. I had all of the
arrangements for the Game Departments in Oregon and Utah, and the college people to meet me.
I had gone downtown. I was going to take the afternoon B&O train to Chicago. I said goodbye
to the family. Along about noon, the telephone rang. It was Ding. He asked when I was going
on the western trip. I told him I was leaving that afternoon. He said, “You’ll have to cancel it.”
I told him I’d only be gone ten days and asked him if whatever he had wouldn’t keep until I got
back. I had all of the arrangements made. “No,” he said, “You can’t”. I told him it was going to
cost him a lot of money in telegrams and telephone calls. But I canceled it. I asked him what he
wanted me to do. He said, “You just stay there until I come in.” I asked him where he was and
he said, “I’m out I the sticks.” In ten days or so, he came in. He called me and asked me to come
up to his office. “I want to talk to you”. It was a hot day in early October. I had no necktie on.
If I did, it was hanging down, but I started for his office.
MR. MARSHALL: What year was this?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was 1935. I got part way up to his office and he came out waved his
arms and said, “Go get your coat on, we’ve got to go up to the Secretaries Office”. Well that
didn’t surprise me because any time anything from the west came up he took me along because I
knew more about it than anybody in the Washington office. I had spent a lot of years out there.
Usually, he’d tell me about it. But he began to ask me about Clara and the kids and how I felt.
He never said a word about what we were going to talk about. Finally, I said, “Say Ding, what’s
the row about this time?” He said, “Oh there’s no row this time. We’re just changing Chiefs of
the Bureau and you’re the new Chief.”
BETTY MARSHALL: Wow, can you imagine?
MR. GABRIELSON: I said, “Jesus Christ!”
BETTY MARSHALL: So now were you taking his place?
MR. GABIELSON: Yeah! He was just stepping out.
MR. MARSHALL: Who was the Secretary?
MR. GABRIELSON: Henry Wallace. So what Ding was trying to do; I’ve always accused him
of it, and he always denied it; but he had arranged this all with Wallace. He tried to get me to
walk in there, and have Wallace congratulate me or say something to me and me in total ignorance
of it. If I hadn’t of asked a straight question that would have happened. I got in there and
Wallace stuck out his hand and said, “Congratulations on your new job!”
BETTY MARSHALL: Now is he the one who ran…..?
MRS. GABIELSON: He ran for President.
MR. GABIELSON: He was the Secretary of Agriculture. He ran for President on a liberal party
ticket. He ran at the time that Roosevelt was running for reelection, and Landen from Kansas
was running too.
MR. MARSHALL: So, this was October 1935, and Wallace congratulated you as being the
new…
MR. GABRIELSON: Then he asked me what my new policies were going to be in my new job.
MR. MARSHALL: What was your new title going to be?
MR. GABRIELSON: Chief of the Biological Survey. I said, “Mr. Secretary, I don’t know. Mr.
Darling just told me outside the door!” He said, “Well, I’m going to tell you; I don’t know
anything about this wildlife work. Ding says you do. You take it and run it and if there is any
time I can help you, why you call on me.”
MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that great?
BETTY MARSHALL: Was he pretty knowledgeable about the subject?
MR. GABRIELSON: He didn’t know anything about it!
MRS. GABRIELSON: But he knew he didn’t.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s the point see. What did you think about this Clara?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Oh, I was very, very pleased of course. It meant recognition for Ira.
He’d always been away from home. I knew that would go on. But he just visited once in a
while. So that’s the way it went.
BETTY MARSHALL: So you set up nine or ten of these cooperative units. How many of
them are there today?
MR. GABRIELSON: There are eighteen.
BETTY MARSHALL: But they are regional things still?
MR. GABRIELSON: They still try to keep them in different ecological areas.
MR. MARSHALL: You might explain how these things are funded. If I’m not mistaken it’s
funding not only by the Wildlife Management Institute….
MR. GABIELSON: ….by the Biological Survey, the Agricultural College and the State Game
Department.
MR. MARSHALL: So in other words in Virginia, at Blacksburg, the Game Commission funds it,
the WMI funds it, and so does the college.
MR. GABRIELSON: The FWS does too.
MR. MARSHALL: So four groups fund it. Can you describe a little bit about what they do?
MR. GABRIELSON: They were set up to do three things. One was to train people for work in
the wildlife field. That was one objective. Another was to do a lot of the fact finding that the
states had not been equipped to do. The other was to do practical research; not just purely
theoretical. Another objective was to set up demonstration areas to show how it as down. None
have them have ever done very much in the demonstration department.
MR. MARSHALL: But they do quite a bit.
MR. GABRIELSON: They do a lot of research work.
MR. MARSHALL: Sometimes, if we have a problem, we can go to them and say that
‘something is happening with the pheasant, could you do a study’? So it works out.
MR. GABRIELSON: The programs have always been oriented towards local problems of that
Game Department, where ever it is. But the fund of knowledge that they have provided and the
number of men that they’ve trained; I don’t know how many now; but about the time I left the
Bureau in 1946 there was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 trained men who had come
out of these units.
BETTY MARSHALL: Did you say once that you have trained some men from Canada?
MR. GABRIELSON: We brought a lot of them down here. They’d get their training. I got
mixed up in a Canadian outfit. There was an outfit called CIL, Canadian International Company.
According to them they were always being badgered. The man I first talked to has been dead for
many years, but he came to me and said, “Isn’t there something we can do with our money that
will help wildlife more than provide beer for Christmas parties?” I told me that there were a lot
of things, and he asked me to write up two or three for him. I wrote two or three outlines of
things and sent them to him. One of them was setting up training schools. There was no school
in Canada where they could get any training. One of them was patterned on this Wildlife school.
They fooled around with it for several years, because they were in some law suits. But one day
they called me and said that they were ready to talk business and they wanted me to come up
and talk to the Board of Directors. I went up to Montreal and talked to them. After several
weeks, my telephone rang one day. This was after I was with the WMI. They said that they
had decided to take this training thing that I outlined. Canadian students all had to come down
here to get their education. We’re going to go with it on two conditions. The first is that if you
will be Chairman of the Committee that handles it. I told them they were crazy and that they
didn’t want an American for that job. This was when the anti-American stuff was getting
started. I said that there would be some resentment among Canadians. They said that they had
thought of that and they wouldn’t put any money into it unless I was the Chairman. I asked
them what the other condition was. They said I was supposed to pick a Canadian to work with
me. They said that they would give me some time to find someone. I told them that I already
know someone in Canada that I could work very well with if they could get him. It was Orris [?]
Lloyd. I gave them his address and he agreed to it. He and I spent one hell of a lot of that
money. We had 15 schools now in Canada, giving training to wildlife people. This went on until
the cut out the program last year.
BETTY MARSHALL: They just cut it out?
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, they had accomplished their objective. They’ve got the colleges, and
the Canadian government, and the Provinces are giving fellowships. It’s an automatic thing now.
We had a little money to give fellowships and to get started. They are using their money to
promote progress.
MR. MARSHALL: So now, let’s go back a moment. You stayed on as Chief of the Bureau until
1946. Then you went with the Institute? What promoted this now?
MR. GABRIELSON: Largely, it was my doctor. From the outbreak of the war in 1941, and in
1940 they combined the wildlife service and the fisheries service into the Fish and Wildlife
Service. They moved both of them into Interior and I was Chief of the outfit. When we got
involved in the European war, they moved the Park Service and us, and the Bureau of Animal
Industry out to Chicago and put us in the old Merchandise Mart. Just after we moved out there,
we had sold our house. Just after we got out there, why, they set up under the War Powers Act
the Fisheries Commission. They made Ickes the head of it, and me the Deputy and I did all of
the work. So I commuted from Chicago to Washington and a lot of other places. I hardly slept in
the same bed twice. I had always had some gall bladder trouble. And it got so bad that my
doctor told me, “Now listen, you either quit that damned job or get a new doctor because you are
wasting my time and your money. I can’t do anything to help you, living the way you do.” So I
went to talk to old man Ickes, who was my boss then. I arranged to step down and do some
writing. I was to be a senior biologist. About that time, these guys started to pester me to take
that job. I turned them down time and time again. They kept offering me more money. I told
them it wasn’t a question of money. I told them that I had my plans all laid out. They offered
me so much money that I couldn’t turn it down. I finally agreed to go in 1946. Then I found out
afterwards that the reason that they kept after me was that I was the only one that all of the
contributors could agree on.
BETTY MARSHALL: Was Rockefeller into the Institute when it was still the American
Wildlife Institute?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, he’s never been involved with it. This was a different thing. It goes
back to 1911 when a group of people were distressed at what was happening to wildlife in
America. They formed an organization called the American Game Protective Association. It was
mostly a bunch of wealthy people. I don’t know who they hired first, but they had Seth
Gordon. They had Paul Miller, and Locke, and several people. They changed their name once to
the American Game Association. Then there got to be a fight between some of the supporters.
It split into two. One bunch which was mostly DuPont supporters and their allies like
Remington Arms and Eastman Kodak and two or three railroads called it the American Wildlife
Institute. The other group set up a separate program based mostly on the propagation of game.
It was out in southern Illinois, and mostly financed by the Ollin [?] people and some others. I
don’t know too much about the history of that one because I never had too much to do with it.
In 1945, they commenced to want to get together again. There was one man in Ollin and one man
in Remington that worked on it until they finally got everybody to agree to unite the two
programs. They set up a new joint program and I was the guy who was picked to run it.
MR. MARSHALL: Something that I know only vaguely about is that the field people like Larry
Young who was out at Horicon Marsh for a long time before you brought him in here. And I
know guys like Phil Barsky who were the field men …..
MR. GABRIELSON: ….of the Wildlife Management Institute.
MR. MARSHALL: Those are the regional guys. There are from four to six or seven of them.
BETTY MARSHALL: What was Rockefeller tied into?
MR. MARSHALL: Was it the World Wildlife Fund?
MR. GABRIELSON: Lawrence has never been in that except that he contributed. He took
several little park organizations and combined them in to the present Parks and Recreation
Association. He set it up. Dwight Redding was chairman of that for a long time.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s what Rusty Groh worked at for a long while before he left. So you
stayed with the Wildlife Management Institute, but in the mean time you were also involved with
the World Wildlife Fund and with Lindbergh and Fritz Phillips and all of that. Are you still
involved with them?
MR. GABRIELSON: I’m still a member of the Board. I’ve gotten out working at any office, but
I’m still a member of the Board. And, I’m honorary President of the American Wildlife Fund.
MR. MARSHALL: So you were President at the Wildlife Management Institute until when?
MR. GABRIELSON: Until 1970.
MR. MARSHALL: That was when Dan Poole came in right?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah.
MR. MARSHALL: When you were in there Pink Guteruss was the Vice President right?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, he was. Dan Poole was the Secretary.
MR. MARSHALL: So when you stepped out Dan came in as President. Larry Yahn came in
from Wisconsin to take Dan’s place. Lonnie Williamson came in as editor of the newsletter.
You’ve seen a lot haven’t you Gabe?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, I have. I’ve built the Wildlife Management Institute.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, I know you did.
MR. GABRIELSON: I think that we’ve been talking for about an hour and a half or two hours,
and we’ve covered a lot of things. But there are so many things I’d like to talk about, and
questions I can’t even begin to think of right now. One of the things that we’ve touched on many
times in our talks is your back pack experiences around the country. I never cease to be amazed
when we might be talking about a certain place and you immediately come out with how you
know the place intimately having been there. You can describe the flora and fauna. I think that’s
just great.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I covered North America pretty well in the field work that I’ve
done. I enjoy it. That’s the thing that I enjoyed more than anything else; being outdoors. I’ve
got a pretty good working knowledge of plants.
MR. MARHSALL: I think you have!
MR. GABRIELSON: I know bugs and things like that. There used to be a lot of fellows like
that. We called them ‘all around naturalists’. But there’s darn few of them now.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s right. One of the questions that is bugging so many people
nowadays especially in the business that we’re in; and that is people like us and people that hunt
and fish talk to each other and we agree. But the thing that concerns us is that there is such a
movement for anti-hunting. How do we combat this?
MR. GABRIELSON: I think that this is the inevitable result of the movement of people into
cities. In my boyhood days, this was an agricultural country. The majority of people lived on
the land and knew something about wildlife. They might not very much, but they knew the
animals that were around them. They were mostly farmers or people in small towns who dealt
with farmers all of the time. They knew something about the life cycles of animals. These
people in the city don’t know a banana from a potato. This is the basic problem. Then, you’ve
got a lot of emotional people who get very excited and emotional. You have to get emotional
about something and a lot of them get emotional about wildlife. They get to the point where
they….I’ve known people who thought it was terrible to kill anything. They wouldn’t even kill
a mosquito. If one landed on their arm, they’d brush it off. They carry it to an extreme.
MR. MARSHALL: But they are great steak eaters.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, when they start in on me, I say ‘well, how much meat do you eat?’
And then I tell them that they are not very consistent because something had to die to provide
that meat.
MR. MARSHALL: It just never occurred to them.
MR. GABRIELSON: They don’t want to think about it. There is only one man I’ve ever met;
and I’m not going to use his name because I have a lot of respect for his consistence; he won’t
wear leather shoes because that’s the hide of an animal. He’ll wear sneakers or canvas shoes or
some synthetics. He won’t eat meat of any kind. He won’t eat anything where something had to
die to provide it to him. Henry Wallace was one of them. He was a complete vegetarian. He
would eat eggs, and drink milk and he would eat cheese. I had lunch with him many times and I
never saw him eat anything other than vegetables and fruit.
BETTY MARSHALL: Wasn’t he a big man?
MR. GABRIELSON: He was a tall gangly man. I had a lot of respect for Henry Wallace. I
didn’t agree with his philosophy a lot but I’ve never known a man who lived up to his basic
philosophy better than he did. He never swore. He was a fine human being.
[Mrs. G. reminds Mr. G of something having to do with Mr. Wallace-unintelligible]
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, that was just a freak thing. I was always interested in those plants.
I’d always try to bring them home and try to grow them. I had quite a collection of them.
MRS. GABRIELSON: We happened to have a place where the soil was well drained. It was in
an old river valley. Those mountain plants would grow there.
MR. GABRIELSON: I was growing them and playing with them all of the time we were there. I
had an uncle came out there. He had lost his business. He had been married to a woman who
divorced him and pretty well cleaned him out. He came out to Portland and saw my plants at
just about the time that the rock garden craze started in Portland. He came out with people who
wanted to buy these plants. I wasn’t in the business. Finally, John said, “Why don’t we start a
nursery? I’ll do the work; you just show me the plants.” So, we started a nursery. I showed
him what to do with them and how to propagate them. I had five acres of ground so we started a
nursery. We began to sell those plants. The wealthy women in town commenced to come out
there prowl all over the place. We got one contract to build a gigantic rock garden for a very
wealthy man. I think we sold him nearly everything we had that was ready to sell. I went to
other nurseries and bought more. I think we did about $20,000.00 worth of work for him. One
of the women who came kept wanting to out in the field with me. Well, I was working and I
didn’t have time to drag a woman around with me. She was a married woman too. And I was
married too. One day I was down in Grants Pass, Oregon working. I came in from the field all
tired and dirty and Kirk says, “You wife is up in your room.” I said, “You’re crazy! My wife
was in Portland with the kids.” He said, “Well, she said she was your wife, and I gave her a
key.” So, I took another key and sure enough Clara was there! I said, “What in the hell are you
doing here?” She said, “Mrs. Berry somehow found out that you were down here in southern
Oregon.” The Siskew Mountains are a very old mountain range. And they’d got a whole flora of
plants that are not found anywhere else in the world. I was working there. She had gone and
found Clara and got a babysitter and brought her down to be there, so she could go out in the field
with me.
MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that beautiful!
MR. GABRIELSON: So I took her out with me and showed her all of these plants and she went
ape! Just nuts! The next day was Sunday so I took her out and showed her these plants. She
went to England where there was a fellow running a very fancy English garden magazine that she
was acquainted with. She started telling him about this trip and what she had seen. He asked her
to write an article about it. She told she couldn’t do it, but she gave him my name. I got a letter
from this guy wanting to know if I would do an article about the alpine plants in this area of
Oregon. So I wrote the article, and sent some photos of the area I had taken. He sent me a thing
that looked thing that looked like a horse blanket. So I began to write a lot of articles for this
magazine. I don’t know how it started, but there was a fellow who ran a printing office in
Harrisburg, and he was the father of the American Rose Society. I can’t remember his name. He
wrote to me and told me that he had corresponded with the guy Cox, over in England. He wanted
a piece on Alpine plants in North America. And he had asked this fellow in England to write
something. He told me that the fellow in England wrote him back and told him that I was the
only man in North America that could do it. I expect that there were lots of people, but I
happened to be the only one that Cox knew. So this fellow wrote to me and said that he wanted
me to do a monograph on American Alpine plants. He said he’d publish it if I would write it. I
said, “Hell no!” I didn’t have any time to do a monograph. Finally I got a letter from his
assistant, wanting to know if I ever came east. I had orders to go to Washington then. I said,
“Yes, I’ll be back there in a few months.” And he said that he thought there was a
misunderstanding. So I stopped in Harrisburg at this outfit’s headquarters. I talked to them and
decided to write that book. That book was written on the train between Washington and
Portland, Oregon mostly.
MR. MARSHALL: This is called, Western American Alpines, by Ira Gabrielson; published in
1932 by MacMillan and Company. There is a forward by H. M. Cox of London.
MR. GABRIELSON: That’s the fellow!
MR. MARSHALL: [reading] … “He never hesitates from stating his opinion of a plants beauty
and possibilities for the garden. And I for one am perfectly content to abide by his judgment.”
I think this pretty well sums up what a lot of people think about Gabe and Clara! Yes indeed.
MR. GABRIELSON: And I wrote most of it on the train!
MR. MARSHALL: And speaking of writing, you know I asked you a number of years ago if
you had any extra copies of your book on game management. You didn’t have any. But I found
an old weather beaten copy down in Virginia somewhere. I meant to bring it over tonight so you
could autograph it for me, but I’m going to bring it some other time. It’s not in very good shape
but it’s a good book anyway.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Have you got a copy of “A Little Bird Book”?
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I’ve got a copy in there unless the kids have carried it off.
I’ve got a copy and it has Ira Gabrielson in it. It’s one of those little….
MR. GABRIELSON: It’s in that Golden Nature Series. I wrote the first one.
MR. MARSHALL: We ought to bring that one out too.
MRS. GABRIELSON: That little book has made him more money than anything else.
MR. GABRIELSON: They’ve sold over 5 million copies of that. It called “Birds”. I’ve got a
note from one of the people in the office from about a year ago saying, “You’ll be interested to
know that this check covers the five millionth copy of your book that has been printed.”
MR. MARSHALL: Incredible! When did you first write it?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was published in about 1950 or 1951; after the end of the World War.
MR. MARSHALL: How many books have you written, roughly?
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I don’t know. There were three MacMillan books, the little bird
book, and a book which was not published by MacMillan; they sold it to MacMillan. I can’t
think of the name of it. Old Horace McFarland. There was Birds of Alaska, and Birds of Oregon.
I edited the Fisherman’s Encyclopedia, and I wrote most of it.
MR. MARSHALL: I remember you told me about that one.
MR. GABRIELSON: I wrote part of the Taylor’s Garden Encyclopedia.
BETTY MARSHALL: Would you say that you had awful good science teachers when you were
in college?
MR. GABRIELSON: I never took any botany in school. I knew more about birds than my boss
the zoologist.
BETTY MARSHALL: Well, where did you learn it from?
MR. GABRIELSON: I just learned it. When I was a kid, I had names for the birds. I had no
books.
BETTY MARSHALL: Well where did you get the names?
MR. GABRIELSON: I made them out of my head!
MR. MARSHALL: He had a way to classify them in his own way.
MR. GABRIELSON: I got to know the birds that were around where I was living. There were
no bird books like you have now. I had names of my own for them. The first book I got my
mother bought for me. It wasn’t a very good bird book, but I thought it was wonderful. It was
Apgar’s Birds of the Eastern United States. Mother found it somewhere and got it for me.
MR. MARSHALL: How old were you then?
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I was about 14 of 15.
MR. MARSHALL: Back in Iowa.
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. And I can’t remember when I didn’t know about plants. Mother
was a gardener and a damned good one. She gave me a little patch of land out behind the house
and I had all of the wildflowers growing that I liked from along the Little Sioux River.
BETTY MARSHALL: I’ve tried, but never been too successful in our yard. I know that the
daisies do better in the sun.
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, most of the daisies like the sunlight. There is one that will grow in
the shade but it’s not a very pretty one.
MRS. GABRIELSON: [unintelligible]….they’ve sent some people, some botanists to learn all
about these plants that he has put in. One of them said, “Oh, what a botanist you are!” And Ira
says, “I’m not a botanist at all!”
BETTY MARSHALL: Just by nature you turned out to be.
MR. GABRIELSON: I just know plants.
MR. MARSHALL: I’d like to get some holly from you some time.
MR. GABRIELSON: I’ve got lots of little seedlings.
MR. MARSHALL: Have you?
MR. GABRIELSON: Sure. They come up all over the place. If you want some, I’ll take a
spade and fix it so you could move them in the fall. I don’t think you’d better move them move
them now it’s late. I filled Larry’s yard.
MR. MARSHALL: I know. He’s very proud of the stuff that you have given him. He’s got a
lot of things coming on now.
MR.GABRIELSON: I’ve given a lot of people holly, but you’ve got to root trim them a year
before.
MRS. GABRIELSON: And you’ve got to prune the tops as well.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, after you dig them you do. The leaves are there to stimulate growth
of the new feeder roots until you have a ball of them. Tomorrow, I’ll go and dig some holes
around them.
MR. MARSHALL: Speaking of tomorrow, it’s getting late and maybe we ought to be moving
along here.
MR. GABIELSON: You don’t have to go. My bedtime is midnight!
BETTY MARSHALL: Do you have a favorite TV show?
MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t ever watch television. We don’t have a TV that’s any good.
BETTY MARSHALL: We don’t either! The best one we had was one that the neighbors were
going to throw in the garbage.
MRS. GABRIELSON: We have one that June had here. But I don’t know how to turn in on.
MR. GABRIELSON: I tell you, all of the writing I’ve ever done, I’ve done at night.
MR. MARSHALL: Me too.
MR. GABRIELSON: Listening to that damn stuff interferes with my work habits. I’ve gotten
more fun out of life than any individual is entitled to.
MRS. GABRIELSON: He always says that throughout his life he’s done everything he would
have been doing if he were independently wealthy.
MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that wonderful! That’s a great thing to be able to say! We talked
about going back and forth to Richmond. I am enjoying what I am doing down there. But I am
not enjoying the commute and so forth. I’m kind of torn between two desires. We like it up
here, and ….
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, you just move the Game Department up here!
MR. MARSHALL: That’s a good idea. Except I think they’d all commit suicide if they had to
come up here!
MR. GABRIELSON: Tell them to come to Northern Virginia; they don’t have to go to work!
BETTY MARSHALL: Northern Virginia is an awful word! It’s Northern Virginia versus
Richmond like the north and south again!
MR. GABRIELSON: Northern Virginia is a foreign country as far and the southern half of
Virginia is concerned.
MR. MARSHALL: You’re right! South of Fredericksburg is a no mans land. So I have a
passport so I can go between!
BETTY MARSHALL: In the winter, spring, fall, you name it, they can have ten inches of snow
in Richmond, and would any local station talk about it? We won’t have any, but we’d never
know that they did because the radio stations won’t talk about it.
MR. GABRIELSON: Richmond gets more snow that we do because they are closer to the
mountains.
MR. MARSHALL: It’s amazing. It’s called the fall line.
MR. GABRIELSON: We sometimes get the effects of the storms that come from the west.
Generally those storms come this way and go out the St. Lawrence Valley. We get the southern
edge of them. The storms that produce the most snow come up the coast. And as they come,
they swing east of here. Sometimes they get more snow in Norfolk than we get here.
MR. MARSHALL: I am looking now at a picture that Clara just showed me. It’s their wedding
picture. This was in Iowa in August of 1912. This is beautiful. And this one is 50 years later!
MRS. GABRIELSON: It was taken right here.
MR. MARSHALL: Well that is just beautiful.
MRS. GABRIELSON: You can’t imagine we are the same people!
MR. MARSHALL: You’ve had a very interesting time haven’t you?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, all our lives. This summer it will be 62 years that we’ve been
married.
MR. MARSHALL: Good heavens! You know one thing I wanted to ask you was about how
you got started going up to that place in Canada. It’s in Quebec isn’t it?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, it is. Messine is the Post Office. When we first went there, it was
Messine, but if you sent a telegram the railroad had to go to Burbedge. It was right in the same
place.
MR. MARSHALL: When did you get that place?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, Ira was Director of the old Biological Survey. And they had some
kind of international meeting. It was in January I believe. He and the Canadian representative
got along beautifully. They settled their problem right away. But the State Department people
and the Canadian Department of External Affairs had to worry about the wording of these things.
It meant that they were going to have to stay over a weekend. Ira had no one. But there was a
man who graduated from the University of Iowa and whose thesis was written about the birds of
Iowa. It had been Ira’s bible for years. He called Dr. Anderson up and asked if there wasn’t
some place we could go and get out of this town for the weekend? Dr. Anderson took him up the
Gatineau River. He couldn’t get up to their place which is on the same island that we later built
on. He had a friend who had a cottage up in that area. Ira liked the looks of the country.
Because of that, and through the Andersons, we were able to rent a place which was right next to
their place on Big Island on Blue Sea Lakes.
….Ira had promised the girls that he would take them on a trip in the summer so they could learn
the eastern part of the country. But that didn’t appeal to them. They didn’t want to go
anywhere but up to Blue Sea Lake. We found that the lot next to it was for sale, so we bought
that in 1938. In 1939 we built our house. We’ve been up there every year except the year I
almost died and the year I broke my ankle.
MR. MARSHALL: I’ve seen pictures of it. It’s beautiful.
MRS. GABRIELSON: We have about four acres up there. And the island was divided so that
everyone had lake shore. And the lots go up to a peak.
MR. GABRIELSON: Our part of the island has never been logged. It’s got virgin timber on it.
MR. MARSHALL: When do you go?
MR. GABRIELSON: About the first of July. The ice doesn’t go out of the lake until some time
in May. Last year they told me it was May 15th.
MR. MARSHALL: Did those folks up there have a big party for you up there didn’t they?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was our 60th wedding anniversary.
MRS. GABRIELSON: It was just remarkable. The things that people would go to so much
trouble to do for you.
MR. GABRIELSON: It was all of the people on the island; all of the people we knew. They
had the wing-ding in the biggest house there was which was on the main land. All of the people
on the main land could drive. All of the people on the island had to take a boat.
MRS. GABRIELSON: There wasn’t enough dock space for everybody. Some came by car, and
we divided up the boats and commuted together. They shipped lobster in and had a lobster
dinner for us. Of course we had plenty to drink. After the dinner was over they had fireworks!
They had all of the youngsters coming by lighting them!
MR. MARSHALL: Here’s a picture of the house on Blue Sea Lake up in Quebec. And here’s a
book on Wildlife Refuges. It was done in 1943. There’s this other one on Wildlife Conservation
which was done in 1941.
MR GABRIELSON: There’s another one on wildlife management that I did for the Service.
MR. MARSHALL: Oh and here’s Birds of Oregon. I haven’t seen this one. That was done in
1940.
MR. GABRIELSON: I worked on that one for years. Look at the picture. It’s a painting that
Murie did that up on the Boukshe River on the Olympic Mounds long before it was a Park. He
made a sketch while we were out together. I had collected one. He told me that when I finished
the book, he would do the frontispiece and put that owl on it.
MR. MARSHALL: And here we have it right here. It’s a Northern Spotted Owl, “a rare
inhabitant of the dense spruce and fur forest”. It’s from a painting by O. J. Murie. Gee wiz, this
is beautiful. I’m looking through here and seeing so many nice things. Here’s a bird that has
always intrigued me, the Loon.
MR. GABRIELSON: We have them up at the lake and we like them.
MR. MARSHALL: I think they are my favorite bird.
MR. GABRIELSON: We have them on the lake all of the time.
MR. MARSHALL: They are aptly named aren’t they?
MR. GABRIELSON: They have that laugh that sounds like a maniac almost. At dawn and
sometimes at night they’ll get in the air and fly around the island and call. It’s a different kind of
call.
MR. MARSHALL: It’s a different call. Not a giggle. It is kind of haunting.
MR. GABRIELSON: There are several pair that breed each year up at the lake.
MR. MARSHALL: We haven’t talked about the subject of firearms. What would you say was
your favorite kind of shooting?
MR. GABRIELSON: I grew up with a waterfowl loader. It’s the only real game we had. I did
get a few Prairie Chickens in the last end of them. We still had a few nesting on our place long
after we quit shooting them. We didn’t have any other upland game birds in the country where I
grew up, but we had lots of waterfowl. We were down at the south end of a little chain of lakes
and marshes that came from the Ocabogue Lake. It came right down through the country and we
had lots of geese and lots of ducks.
MR. MARSHALL: I grew up in Minneapolis and around Minnesota as you know. I guess my
favorite kind of hunting was pheasant hunting.
MR. GABRIELSON: There were no pheasants when I was growing up.
MR. MARSHALL: I used to go waterfowl hunting but for some reason my Dad never was
much of a waterfowl hunter. He did like to hunt pheasants. You know, you go along with what
your Dad did. I can remember that in the fall when the season was in, we’d go every weekend.
Then he’d come and get me after school sometimes and we’d go ‘til dark. I guess that’s why I am
so intrigued with the pheasants here in Virginia. One of the things that interests me from when
I’ve hunted with these people from Virginia. Now they are getting accustomed to the pheasants
because we’ve have four seasons. Both of the guys; some of the people from the Game
Commission and others had never hunted pheasants. They reacted so strangely; as did their
dogs! The dogs couldn’t believe what was happening with these pheasants. They were so used
to hunting quail. You know what a pheasant will do! Sometimes if you don’t hit him square and
when he might be wounding but he’s running 45 miles an hour before he hits the ground! This
just threw the dogs all off. They didn’t know what to make of that! It’s quite a bird!
MR. GABRIELSON: I’ve done some pheasant hunting, but I didn’t do it growing up out west.
They had lots of pheasants in Oregon. That’s where they started in about 1890.
MR. MARSHALL: I’m trying to remember now. Our first year we had a two day season. We
killed about 225 here in Virginia. Since then we’ve had a one week season. We’ve been averaging
about 400 a year.
MR. GABRIELSON: Is that mostly in the Shenandoah Valley?
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah. But strangely enough, the second highest county was Loudoun. Page
County was the highest and then Loudoun. That’s going to change I think.
MR. GABRIELSON: There’s got to be grain fields before they’ll do too good.
MR. MARSHALL: The thing that intrigued me out in Page County was that it was very
reminiscent of Iowa and the Dakotas and Minnesota. There were little grain fields and plowed
fields and brushy ditches and some woods. It was also near some water. It was good habitat for
pheasant. It looked like pheasant habitat.
MR. GABRIELSON: That’s why I asked if it was the Shenandoah Valley earlier. It looks like
pheasant country.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, and there was some corn too.
MR. GABRIELSON: We see one here once in a while but I think they are escapes from some of
these feeding farms. There was for a long time a shooting place up here, you know, one of those
controlled shoots? They brought in birds and turned them loose. I’ve seen some turkey down
there.
MR. MARSHALL: You know, I’ve never killed a wild turkey. That’s something I want to do.
MR. GABRIELSON: I have.
MR. MARSHALL: I know, darn it! I don’t begrudge you that, I’d just like to do it myself!
This last spring gobbler season I took my daughter Nancy, whom you’ve met. She goes to
school out in Harrisonburg. I arranged for her to be able to go along. I also brought Eric who is
the youngest. We went out and spent the night in Harrisonburg and met with a couple of the
people from the Game Commission who had taken the day off and we went hunting. My
daughter went with those two guys. My son went with me. My son and I didn’t hear anything.
But Max Carpenter who was with Nancy got a 21 ½ pounder with a nine inch beard! It was
really a beautiful bird. What was so thrilling to me was that Nancy was with him when he got it.
She heard him gobble and called. She was a little bit dismayed to see this bird shot, but I think
she was still kind of proud that she was long.
MR. GABRIELSON: I had a funny experience once when we had started home from south
Texas. A friend of mine in Kingsville, which is only about 100 miles, wanted me to stop and go
fishing with him. I had my fishing tackle in the car. He wanted me to take my fly rod. I went
out to a little bit of a pond they had on this little place. There might have been two or three acres
of it. He fished with bait. I said, “I want to see you catch something with that fly rod.” There
are brim and black bass in here. There might have been brim, but I never had one of them strike
it. He was fishing with shrimp. I took a look at that shrimp and picked the nearest colored fly
that I could find. I started to fish and you know, I got three beautiful large mouthed Bass with a
fly. He just didn’t believe it! He said, “What are you using!?” I told him, “Just a dirty little
bunch of feathers!”
MR. MARSHALL: You know what of the hottest fishing lakes in the state right now is called
Lake Anna, which is down here about two hours south west of here. It is the VEPCO [Virginia
Electric Power Company] impoundment for the cooling of their water from the towers. So far
it’s terrific for bass. It slacked off a couple of weeks ago because the bass were on the beds, but
it picking up again. There is a lot of controversy about this because VEPCO says that it’s going
to continue to be good fishing. Our biologists and the Atomic Energy Commission say that this
isn’t going to be the case. When they put those reactors on line the water is going to heat up and
it’s going to destroy all of the microorganisms that the young bass eat. And consequently if they
don’t have anything to eat they aren’t going to make it.
MR. GABRIELSON: That’s right.
MR. MARSHALL: So we heard two sides of the coin. We had an outdoors writers meeting, and
one night we heard our biologist and the next night we heard the VEPCO people. Of course they
painted it all in glowing colors. But the inevitable….
[end of tape 2]

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

IRA AND CLARA GABRIELSON
MAY 31, 1974
BY DAVE MARSHALL
MR. MARSHALL: It’s about 6:20pm and we’re out here at Gabe and Clara’s and having a few
libations before supper. I’m just doing a little recording here. Sitting here right next to me is one
of my favorite girlfriends, Clara Gabrielson! It’s been too long since we’ve been out here Clara.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, I know it has! And it’s worried me; I’ve been wanting to see you
for so long! Finally the other day Ira was in there working away and I said to myself, “well, I’m
not going to say a thing to him, I’m just go call them and they come!”
MR. MARSHALL: Good, I’m glad you did! Well, I’ve been out here two or three times you
know while you were down in Texas and I sat and talking with Cash. He’s awful lonesome you
know.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I know he is. Yes, and it is too bad. You know he hasn’t been well.
He’s only worked one or two days since we’ve been home. We came home about the first of
May. He hasn’t been at all well, and we’ve been dragging around you know. So I don’t know.
Ira says maybe we’d better go and have our water tested. He was concerned that there might be
some kind of infection we were getting. Because since our well was put down, there have been
houses built all around us everywhere. And they all have to have septic tanks. So it could be
infected.
MR. MARSHALL: Well, it wouldn’t hurt to have it checked.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I think we should do that, but we still haven’t though. I don’t know.
I’m afraid Ira worries because he thinks Cash isn’t going to be able to do anything very long.
And really, we need somebody here. If Cash can’t be here, why, somebody else will have to be.
MR. MARSHALL: And it’s going to hard to find somebody to replace him; for reliability and
everything else.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Impossible, I think, because he has come here for twenty years and
worked for a few hours a day. As long as his mother was alive, and then she died he came and
borrowed a spade, a shovel to dig her grave. His brother was here, and he was killed when the
house burned. There are so many other things. Also, Cash was 67 or 68 and he commented one
day that he hadn’t been able to get any Social Security. Ira asked him why. He said he didn’t
know. He just couldn’t get it, and neither could Pearl, his daughter. A lawyer that he’d gotten
couldn’t get it. Ira said, “You bring me the papers!” He did have an Uncle near here. He was
born here near where Dulles Airport is now. He did have an old Uncle who knew the names of
his parents. He knew that Cash had been born there. Ira wrote to the Census Bureau and
Records office, that James Cash Brooks was seven years old in 1910. Ira took that and Cash and
went down to the Social Security Office and got him his Social Security!
MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that nice!
MRS. GABRIELSON: So he just worships the ground that Ira walks on. Do you know that one
year back he gave Ira the check and asked him to go and open a savings account for him? He has
almost $4,000.00 in his savings account now!
MR. MARSHALL: Oh, isn’t that nice! He’s a delightful person isn’t he?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, he is, and he’d just do anything for Ira.
MR. MARSHALL: Tell me about your place down in Texas. You know we’ve talked about it
in the past.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, Jean went down there in about 1947. She has finished that school
downtown on L Street. [Washington, D.C.] It was an accounting school. She graduated with
honors. She was the Valedictorian I guess. Then she found that she couldn’t be a CPA, and
couldn’t take the test even, until she had worked a year in a CPA office. Well, she couldn’t get a
job in a CPA office because they would not have a woman. During the war she had met his boy
who’d been up here. He was an engineer over in Asia Minor. He’d been here in Washington
later. He said that if she went down to the Valley she could get a job in a CPA office. So she
went down there. Of course, she married him and did get a job in a CPA office. But after she got
it, and worked there a while, she discovered she could make more money keeping books than as a
CPA. So she switched and went to keeping books. She married this boy in 1948 I think. Two
years ago, at just about this time of year he died. But before that Jean began to have trouble with
her left leg. She couldn’t manage it. It was just hard to manage. She went to the doctor and they
sent her to Houston and everywhere else, from one person to another. Finally, they said that
there were no two ways about it, she had Multiple Sclerosis. It’s never changed a single bit since
then. But the doctor said that she was unemployable. She cannot keep books any longer. So she
went to work to raise Wire Haired Terriers. And, as a result, she moved out of town so the dogs
wouldn’t bother the neighbors so much. They had rented a place there. Ira had gone down there
for various reasons. When he was in the FWS he as down there buying land for Uncle Sam. He
bought two refuges down there in the Valley. Then, after he left the FWS he went into the World
Wildlife Fund and they wanted some land down there. So much of the brush land in the valley
was being cleared. It was the habit for so many of the birds that come in from Mexico. It is just
across the river you see. Anyway, he knew this place where Jean lived. Of course, we all visited
them when they were down there. He’d go over there because it was brush land and watch the
birds. There were Lichtenstein’s Orioles and Chatchalaca’s and other things that came in from
Mexico only in a very limited area there. One day, we got a telephone call. They said ‘that land
is for sale. There’s nine and third acres’. There had been a divorce in the family and the wife got
that land. She wanted her money out of it. Ira asked how much they wanted for it. When David
told him he says, “Okay, we’ll but it!” Ira called up the lawyer who had been buying WWF land
for him. He asked him to buy that land for him. He did that. So that’s they way we happened
to get nine and a half acres.
It’s largely native brush that grows there naturally. There are trees they call Brazil. There are
Texas Ebony and Texas Persimmon and many others. There lots of Mesquite.
MR. MARSHALL: Describe where it is. You said it’s near Mexico. What’s the town I mail
things to?
MRS. GABRIELSON: It’s La Feria. It’s about 30 miles up the river from Brownsville. I
presume that our place may be 5 for 6 miles from the river. But of course, the river isn’t very
wide there, and the other side is Mexico.
MR. MARSHALL: Well now, you put a trailer down there didn’t you, a mobile home?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, after we bought that land, Jean and David both began to say
‘Why on earth do you stay up there and shovel snow in the winter?’ They said we should come
down and spend the winter here. I said it would cost a lot of money to fix a place for us. David
said we should rent a mobile home for a while. But you can’t do that until you get a septic tank
and until you get gas in and some way of heating. You have to have to have electricity and this,
that and the other thing. Of course I was always finding a reason why we shouldn’t do it. Then,
we got a letter [unintelligible]. Then I told him to find us a mobile home that we could rent.
Well, he had a little problem there. They had had one hurricane through there and people didn’t
rent mobile homes. But he finally found one. He liked them so much that he took Jean with him.
The house they were renting was a big old stone house that a man built. He had no idea of
building. He was not an architect, nor a builder. He built it with wetback Mexican labor that
didn’t know any more than he did. It was built on a slab. All of the pipes and wiring was in that
slab. It was just trouble, trouble; always. Well Jean got tired of that. It was a great big house
too. They didn’t need a big house. She went with him to look at some of these mobile homes.
After they found one for us, they said that they found that they could buy one and pay for it
with less money than they paid in rent every month if they put it our lot. So we said “sure, why
not!” So it was just right up next to a section of the irrigation canal. It has not been filled. All of
the irrigation pipe for the valley is underground. They say they get too much evaporation and so
forth. But that little bit had been let. So they set theirs right here, and ours just across the
driveway. Ours is sixty feet long and twelve feet wide. We have three bedrooms and a full bath.
It’s just all linoleum. Not a lot of work to take care of.
MR. MARSHALL: Well, that’s great isn’t it?
MRS. GABRIELSON: I think so, really.
MR. MARSHALL: And you don’t have to shovel any snow either do you?
MRS. GABRIELSON: No, we don’t have to shovel snow, but we did have three freezes. One
freeze and two frosts. That’s the most they’ve ever had I guess.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s the winter of ’73 and ’74. I think maybe I remember Gabe said
something. He wrote me one letter and mentioned something about that.
MR. GABIELSON: He may have. I think it was in December when we had the coldest weather
but it didn’t last but just a very little while. And it didn’t kill all of the semi-tropical stuff. I’ll
bet you everything is ready. [Referring to the evening meal.]
MR. MARSHALL: [to Ira] We’ve been having a great visit here. We’ve been talking about your
place down in Texas. She’s been telling me all about how it came to be.
MR. GABRIELSON: Don’t believe everything she says, it might not be true!
[Tape skips forward.]
MR. GABIELSON: We’ve had more fun in life than any two people I know.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s great. It sure sounds like it. And you know, there’s so many things
that I want to talk to you about. We started talking about Kodiak Browns, about that bear. I
was thinking, and Jill and I were talking about it the other day. And we’ve had some
conversations about Model Ts. I’d like to talk to you about Model Ts and what Clara’s told us
about her problems with Model Ts.
MR. GABRIELSON: We had plenty of Model Ts. One of the things that always amused me
was that another fellow and I [tape skips] we had a chow box and where ever night overtook us
well, that was where we stayed.
MR. MARSHALL: What period of time are we talking about?
MR. GABRIELSON: This was about 1918 to about 1930.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s magnificent! If you see a color green, it’s true, only because I am
green with envy.
MR. GABRIELSON: We had this thing, and one day we were out near Pineville, Oregon. We
had a crew working up on top of Blue Mountains, which aren’t rugged, but they’re steep. Jim
and I decided that instead of getting pack horses, we’d see if we couldn’t get up there in the
Model T. We had what they called a ruckstel [sic] axle.
MR. MARSHALL: I’ve heard of them but I didn’t know what it was.
MR. GABRIELSON: It’s a very low gear. You could put a Ford up against a stone wall and it
would turn the wheels until it wore the tires out. Couldn’t choke it down. So started up there
and wove our way through the tall yellow pine forest. It was an open, park like forest. We
wiggled our way around those downed logs and up the hill. We got up on top. There was a big
flat, prairie like area and we knew our men were camped there. We started to hunt for them. We
can around a corner of little yellow pines and we came across a Ranger. He said, “How in the hell
did you get this thing up here?” He was on a horse! We said, “We drove it up here”. He told us
he didn’t believe it. I told him, “Well, we’re hear and we sure as hell didn’t carry it up!”
MR. MARSHALL: I think that probably in the history of the United States, one of the more
colorful things, like how cowboys were colorful, in the settlement of the west. But the Model T
had a great part on that same vein.
MR. GABRIELSON: It did. I remember once, I was in North Dakota. Another fellow and I
were driving an old Model T without a top on it. I don’t know whether you know how they
were built or not. They had a cylinder with bands around it with two headers that pulled
together.
MR. MARSHALL: It had three pedals on the floor.
MR. GABRIELSON: We pulled a pedal loose. We broke the pedal on one of those headers. It
was the low gear and we were in some sand. We were trying to cross the Missouri River up near
Sanish [?], North Dakota. We didn’t have many tools. I don’t know why, but we didn’t. So we
finally took the crank case off of that thing. We found a nail and repaired it. We put it back
together and we were camped there for about twenty-four hours. We put it back together and we
made it into Sanish.
MR. MARSHALL: There was something about the Model T. And mind you, I don’t know
much about it. I’ve only worked on a few of them. But there was something about the Model T
that if you could solve the secret of it, you fix it with darn near anything!
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. We used to say that we could fix it with anything; a hair pin or a
piece of chewing gum. It was a very simple piece of mechanism, but it was sturdy. It had about
over a foot of clearance. You could go anywhere with it. We drove it all over the desert. There
were no roads. We’d get into a piece of rocky ground and one of us would walk ahead of the car
and throw the big rocks out of the way.
MR. MARSHALL: Not knowing much, as I say, but having a great love affair with the Model
T; I think probably one of the greatest drawbacks would have been the tires. Because the tires,
and this is my own opinion, but the tires were not as good as the car.
MR. GABRIELSON: They weren’t. We thought we’d do awfully well if we got two to three
thousand miles out of a set of tires. Back in those days, you paid about as much for tires as you
do now.
MR. MARSHALL: The state of the art was way behind.
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, if we got two or three thousand miles we thought we were doing
awfully well for the kind of driving we did.
MR. MARSHALL: Of course the roads were bad but even so….
MR. GABRIELSON: Hell, there weren’t any roads where we went!
MR. MARSHALL: My Dad told me about driving a Model back from California to Minnesota.
I made have told you this story before, but at the risk of repeating…Something happened one
night. They were driving along and something happened. They were stalled and couldn’t fix it.
In the desert as you know, it gets cold as the dickens at night. So they took the kerosene lamps
of the side and put the glass curtains on. The only warmth they had was these lamps. Finally,
they got a little fitful sleep. Then, much to their chagrin, the next morning when the sun came up
they walked up on top of a dune and about three hundred yards away there was a town, which
they didn’t know was there!
MR. GABRIELSON: Once, another fellow and I, Jewitt, were driving our old Ford and we got
stuck.
MR. MARSHALL: Where was this?
MR. GABRIELSON: In eastern Oregon; Klamath Marsh. We got stuck. It was raining like hell
and we just got our blankets out and slept under the car! It was darker than pitch. The next
morning we got up and cut some old jack pines and pried that car out. We then got in to Silver
Lake. We were cold and hungry. And this is one of the funniest things I ever saw. We were cold
and hungry and tired. Silver Lake is a ghost town. It had been quite a town back in about 1912.
There had been some wet years. A lot of people had gone up there and homesteaded. But this
town was pretty much of a ghost town. There was an old hotel there and they still had rooms.
They has a sort of a snack back for a restaurant. That’s all there was. So Jewitt and I went in
there and ordered some ham and eggs. There was a cowboy there. He was sitting there and
finally the waiter brought him out a great big steak. He took his knife and fork and whittled and
whittled and whittled on it. He turned the thing around and whittled some more. Finally, he got
mad. He got up and picked up that steak and through it on the floor behind the counter and said,
“Goddammit, bring me some ham and eggs! This is the third morning I’ve had that steak and I
haven’t gotten a bite off it yet!”
MR. MARSHALL: Gab, it’s good to see you. It’s been too long since we’ve had the chance to
sit down and talk.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, we had a lot of adventures with that old Model T.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah. You know, there was a story in the Reader’s Digest about, oh gosh,
it’s got to be back around 1939 or 1940. It was entitled, “Farewell My Lovely”. I don’t know
who wrote it. But it was really a kind of love story about a Model T.
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. Well I went out to Oregon in 1918. Jewitt was there. He was
already there. He was working on a dam, and I was working on roads. In that country, we
traveled together as much as we could. It was really rough to travel alone. We had some wild
times, and a lot of fun. We used to do something that you couldn’t do with any modern car.
MR. MARSHALL: What was that?
MR. GABRIELSON: There were no roads down the Oregon coast when you got below, oh the
lower third of the Oregon coast. We used to travel it. We’d drive that Model T on the beaches at
low tide. And there were some old wood roads over the mountains. This was mountainous
country where the mountain would stick way out over the ocean. We’d get on an old wood road
and get over that hump and get down on the beach again. We used to travel from [sounds like]
Kokeel clear to California with an old Model T like that. You couldn’t do that with any modern
car in the world. Of course you don’t need to now. They’ve got a good highway down there
now.
MR. MARSHALL: What did you do about getting gasoline?
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh there were little towns where you could get gas. But we always
brought extra too.
MR. MARSHALL: That brings up a point that I’d like to ask. We’ve had our shortage of gas
now but say there wasn’t the organized gasoline facilities around. You really had to plan ahead.
MR. GABRIELSON: There were always gas stations, even then, in the towns. There weren’t
any in the open spaces. We always carried gas and extra oil and extra water.
MR. MARSHALL: If you were to guess, or if you can remember, what kind of miles per gallon
did you get? You couldn’t really…..
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I don’t know.
MR. MARSHALL: No, you could really. Because the miles that you traveled were really
arduous, up and down and around.
MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t know what we got. We were in places where it was hard going.
You ran in low gear all of the time.
MR. MARSHALL: There was no way in the world you could tell.
MR. GABRIELSON: One of the funny things about it was if you got on a real steep area; these
old Fords had nothing but a gravity feed into the carburetor. We used to turn around and back up
the hill!
MR. MARSHALL: That’s right, because that front main bearing was a splash system as I recall.
You’d burn that front bearing out if you didn’t get the oil to it.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, we didn’t get any gas either. The gas tank was on the back end of
the car. The carburetor was on the front end. If you got onto a steep grade you didn’t get any
gas in the carburetor. So we used to turn around and back up the hill!
MR. MARSHALL: Well, these were the days when this country was just expanding with
automobiles and where you drove, as you said, you made your own roads!
MR. GABRIELSON: That’s right. There were old sheep wagon trails where the camp tenders
hauled grub to the sheep herders. We’d follow those where we could. When there wasn’t any
road we just struck off cross country in the direction we wanted to go!
MR. MARSHALL: You didn’t drive any at night did you?
MR. GABRIELSON: No. We camped at night.
[tape paused]
….a big part of it is sage brush desert. It’s great flat areas with most of the high country is
between four and five thousand feet. The desert is up that high. Then there are higher mountain
ranges.
MR. MARSHALL: I know very little about Oregon. I’ve been to Portland, and I’ve flown over
it but I’ve never been on the ground there.
MR. GABRIELSON: I spent seventeen years there. You’ll find my foot prints all over the
state.
MR. MARSHALL: When was it when you first went to Oregon?
MR. GABRIELSON: 1918.
MR. MARSHALL: Where did you go to Oregon from?
MR. GABRIELSON: I was stationed in North Dakota in Fargo.
MR. MARSHALL: What were you doing in Fargo?
MR. GABRIELSON: My headquarters were there, but I wasn’t in Fargo much. I was working
you see. This was during World War I. Mostly I was working…they were trying to make the
Indians grow some corn and wheat and grain on their reservations.
MR. MARSHALL: Now who were you working for?
MR. GABRIELSON: I was working for the Biological Survey, in the Department of Agriculture.
They sent us out there and told us to clean out the Prairie Dogs on those Indian reservations so
they could raise some grain. The Indians did want it. Some of the smart old Indians would take
the grain they were sent and put right around the Prairie Dog holes. The Prairie Dogs would
harvest it!
MR. MARSHALL: What Indians were out there around Fargo?
MR. GABRIELSON: Well they weren’t at Fargo. I was out farther west, but that was the
headquarters. They had an office there which I wasn’t in very often. I was working with another
man who was in charge of the district. I was sent out there to help him. I was a new biologist.
MR. MARSHALL: Were you married at that time?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah.
MR. MARSHALL: Was Clara living in Fargo?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, Clara was here in Washington. We came to Washington in 1915 from
Iowa. I graduated as a biologist and taught high school for three years at Marshalltown, Iowa.
And I taught agriculture too. I got a fellowship at Iowa State University to work for my Doctors
degree, and we had moved down to Iowa State in Iowa City. Clara’s folks lived there at that
time. After I got down there, I got a wire from a fellow by the name of McItee. I had taken the
Civil Service Examination for a biologist and had never heard from them. That wire wanted to
know if I’d take a job as an Assistant Biologist at $75.00 a month, and live in Washington. So I
took it to my major professor and showed it to him. He asked me about it and I told him that I
had taken the exam when I first got out of college, and had never heard from it. He said, “Well,
this is probably it.” I asked him what I should do. He studied it for a while and said, “I’m going
to tell you something. You’ll learn more about the things you are interested in if you take this
job, than you will if you stay here with me.” He was an invertebrate biologist. He advised me to
take it even thought I wouldn’t get a degree out of it. So, I wired back that I would accept it.
And on October 1, 1915 Clara and I landed in Washington with one baby. $75.00 a month from
Uncle Sam Houston, in cash paid on every 1st and 15th of the month. They brought around an
envelope with $37.50 cents in it. It was beautiful.
We rented a room in one of those old houses on G Street wasn’t it first? [Asking Clara]
MRS. GABRIELSON: Well….
MR. GABRIELSON: And were in a little room over a grocery store part of the time, and right
next to the old slate war and navy building there.
MRS. GABRIELSON: The one over the grocery store was on 20th and H Streets. It was over a
Sanitary Grocery. That was a year or two later.
MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t remember if the old house was on G or H Street.
MRS. GABRIELSON: It was right behind the YMCA. There was that YMCA building right
out of the window. And we had a back room which had been built as a butler’s pantry or
kitchen. The butler’s pantry was rearranged to be our kitchen. It has a dumb waiter in it. The
rats used to come in that way.
MR. MARSHALL: The one child you had then was June?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, that was June.
MR. GABRIELSON: We stayed there that winter. In the spring of 1916 I was sent up to
Connecticut to study starlings. So this was when they first really began to spread. They spread
out from Central Park, clear up to the northern limit of Massachusetts. There were little colonies
in Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire. Most of them were in Connecticut along the shore and
up the river valley. Clara took the baby and went back to Iowa and stayed with her folks who
lived in Iowa City. And she spent part of the time with my folks who lived in northern Iowa. I
was there from April to October. That was one of the most interesting experiences. I went up
there with a whole list of people who had written in the Bureau complaining about starlings doing
various things. I was supposed to go see all of these people and check on it. When I got up there
the first man I got acquainted with was the Game Warden. He was quite an outdoor man, and
quite an outdoor man. He took me one night to a bird club meeting in Norwalk, CT. I told him
about what I was doing, or trying to do. After the meeting an elderly couple came up to me and
said, “Young man, where are you staying?” I told them I was staying in an old flea bitten hotel
down there. They said, “That no fit place for a young man like you to stay!” The woman told
me she would send her husband down the next morning to pick me up. The next morning he was
there to pick me up. He took me home and they gave me a room and I lived in that room all
summer!
MR. MARSHALL: Is that right!? Do you remember their name?
MR. GABRIELSON: Their name was Merrill. I used that room while I was there; I worked all
along the Connecticut shore, but that room was my headquarters. One Sunday morning this
Warden came and wanted me to go out with him and do something. Under the Connecticut blue
laws I could fire a gun and collect anything. I was collecting starlings to get their stomachs. So I
went out with him. When I came back my suitcase was all packed. He gave me a ticket to Iowa
City and $100.00 in cash. This was Mr. Merrill. He went out and collected it from all the
neighbors. The bank was closed because it was Sunday.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Two telegrams had come. Mr. Merrill knew that I was in Iowa with the
baby. He was confident that there was something wrong or we wouldn’t have sent two
telegrams. One said that June was very ill and might have to have an operation. The next one
said that she had to have the operation and was not expected to live. What did he do, but go out
among all of his relatives and friends and gather all of the money they had. It was Sunday you
see. He bought a ticket and got the reservation for him. His wife packed the suitcase. When he
came in they just handed it to him and took him to the station. It was remarkable.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s remarkable.
MR. GABRIELSON: I spent the whole summer up there working on those starlings.
MR. MARSHALL: Have starlings changed any since that time?
MR. GABRIELSON: Not much. One of the interesting recollections that I have about it is that
starling form summer roosts after the young are hatched. There was an island called Belle Island.
It was really a little island in the Long Island Sound. They put a bridge over to it and there was a
circular drive around the island. Everybody was a millionaire who had a house there facing the
Sound. I remember that they wanted to break up that starling roost. I had all of the millionaires
at Belle Island out there with their shotguns and fireworks and everything, chasing starlings. We
broke it up.
Are they in the Midwest?
MR. GABRIELSON: They are all over the United States.
BETTY MARSHALL: But they weren’t at that time?
MR. GABRIELSON: No. They were started like this. They were brought in to Central Park
by an old German who liked them and released them in New York City. They stayed there. This
was in about 1890, I think. I’d have to check my notes.
MR. MARSHALL: Did they come from Germany?
MR. GABRIELSON: They came from Europe. They are European birds. He released them in
Central Park. They stayed there for years. And then they began to spread. By 1916 when
we…
Ed Conbeck [?] and I were the team that worked on them. He worked New Jersey and
Pennsylvania and the lower part of New York. I worked Long Island and Connecticut,
Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and into the edge of Vermont. I once got as far as Brattleboro,
Vermont. Every two weeks we’d meet in New York City and compare notes. These people I
was staying with; they thought it was terrible for me to get on a train and go to New York
without a suitcase. It was all of an hour or an hour and a half ride maybe. I was supposed to
take my suitcase. I was making a trip!
MR. MARSHALL: They sound like great people.
MR. GABRIELSON: They were wonderful people. I went back to see them every time I went
to Connecticut for as long as they lived.
BETTY MARSHALL: What did they do? What was his business?
MR. GABRIELSON: They were a family that had…part or some of the land that that family
owned was still in the family from the old English land grant. The family had logged it several
times. They had a mill not far from where Merle lived. Of course they were old and retired by
the time I knew them. I suppose he was in his late sixties. They looked after me just like I was
one of their kids. She’d scold me if I got my clothes dirty. And she raised hell if I came in with
my feet wet. One day she got after me. I had been out fishing with him, and came back with a
whole washtub of fish. She didn’t approve of some of things he did. He used to go fishing on
Sunday and she didn’t approve of that. So she got after me for going along. Then, he announced
that he was going to vote the Democratic ticket. She got after me and said, “Now, you talk to St.
John!” He name was St. John Merle. She said, “You’ve got a lot of influence with him. You see
if you can’t [change his mind]. It would be horrible if he voted Democratic!”
MR. MARSHALL: What election was this?
MR. GABRIELSON: This was 1916 when Woodrow Wilson was running.
MR. MARSHALL: You know, we were talking at dinner and speaking of Woodrow Wilson.
You talked about how you went to see the inauguration parade for Wilson’s second term, is that
right? Tell us about that again.
MR. GABRIELSON: We lived right close to Pennsylvania Avenue. The parades always started
down by the Capital on Pennsylvania Avenue pass the reviewing stand at the White House. We
were living just off of 18th Street. It was a cold, windy March day in 1917. We bundling June
up. She was just a baby. This parade came by finally after it had passed the White House and it
would go several blocks beyond that and disperse. One of the funniest shows I ever saw was the
Tammany delegation that came along, from Tammany Hall in New York. There was this great
big heavyset fellow. He had a lot of meat on him. He was carrying great big velvet banner with a
rope on each side with a man holding it out. He had the banner pole stuck into his belt. When he
got around the corner of 18th Street a big gust of wind came up and he took off down 18th Street
going south! I don’t think he hit the ground once in fifty feet! These two guys were struggling to
pull him down. It was really funny.
MR. MARSHALL: A runaway blimp! That brings to mind something. Did Mr. Wilson ride in
that parade?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, well, he did to the White House. No, no he didn’t. Don’t any of
them ride in those parades. They had the reviewing stand with all of the notables; the Senators
and Congressmen.
MR MARSHALL: Well, has Washington changed much in the time you’ve seen it?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, it has changed a lot, I’m not sure for the better. When we lived here
Washington was kind of sleepy southern town. The farmer’s market was where the [sounds like
Enterprise] Building is now.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell them about the cars the old ladies used to ride around in.
MR. GABRIELSON: They had those electric cars. They were around here for years. There
was one here when we came back from Oregon.
MRS. GABRIELSON: They just had this one rod that they would steer it with.
MR. MARSHALL: It seems to me that in one of our earlier conversations you talked about
having built a house out somewhere like Arlington. Where was it?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was in east Falls Church. It was just off of where West Street is now. I
haven’t been by there recently, but somebody built on to that old house.
MR. MARHSALL: What year did you build it?
MR. GABRIELSON: That was in 1917. When June recovered we brought her back here and
were living in the same place that we had been. The Doctor said we had to get her out of doors.
So I knew two fellows in the Dept. of Agriculture, Biological Survey. I bought an acre of land
out there. I promised to pay for it. I bought if for $100.00. I borrowed a little money and
bought lumber. I built the house myself. I went to my boss who was Waldo Lee Macatee, and
asked him if I could have ten days leave. He asked me what I was going to do. I told him I was
going to. I told him I was going to build a house. I had already cleared a little place for it. It was
mostly a grove of Virginia pine. I cut some blocks out of the bigger Virginia pine and set it up on
blocks. On the tenth day we moved what few belongings we had out there.
MR. MARSHALL: In ten days! Wow!
MR. GABRIELSON: Now, I didn’t work union hours. I’d get up and take the first car. We had
an interurban car [train] system then that went way out to Bl… [tape skips] One of the
neighbors helped me a little bit. And Clara would stand around and hand me things. She’d look
after the baby and run errands for me.
MR. MARSHALL: Now let me ask this; you mentioned a car. What kind of a car are you
talking about?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was a Streetcar. Nobody had cars in those days. And there weren’t
any roads to put them on.
MR. MARSHALL: Now, when we need that sort of interurban transportation we don’t have it!
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, after the tenth day, I went back to work. The house wasn’t quite
finished but we had moved in. I had three rooms; a kitchen, bedroom and living room.
MRS. GABRIELSON: One section of the living room was not floored. Do you remember?
There were two or three feet of it that didn’t have any floor.
MR. GABRIELSON: The neighbors came by that first night and helped me lay the rest of it.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I was afraid the baby would fall.
MR. GABRIELSON: After we had moved out there I dug the basement out under the house and
built a foundation under it.
MR. MARSHALL: This house it still standing isn’t it?
MR. GABRIELSON: The last time I went by there it was.
MR. MARSHALL: It’d be fun to go by and take a look at it.
BETTY MARSHALL: Was it like a log cabin?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was a frame house. In those days lumber wasn’t as strict as it is now.
MR. MARSHALL: How did you light it? Did you have electricity?
MR. GABRIELSON: We lighted it with kerosene lamps.
MRS. GABRIELSON: We had a pump and well out in the side yard and [unintelligible]. We’d
go out and pump out own water.
MR. MARSHALL: Let me ask you. Could you remember how deep you had to go to get good
water?
MR. GABRIELSON: I had to dig the well about thirty feet deep.
MR. MARSHALL: Did you do it yourself?
MR. GABRIELSON: I got some help from somebody. Can’t remember who.
MR. MARSHALL: So it was driven, you had a tool to drill down in the ground?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, it was dug by hand.
MR. MARSHALL: So the water level was really quite close to the surface. So to clarify in my
mind; this was in east Falls Church. And it’s near Peacock Buick?
MR. GABRIELSON: West Street wasn’t there then. We got off at the second station after the
East Falls Church Station. It was called it Green Gables. You had to walk through the woods to
get to where we were building our house.
MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that wild!
MR. GABRIELSON: I can’t remember his name but there was a Doctor who had a house right
where we got off the train. East Falls Church then consisted of a grocery store, a railroad station
and a lumber yard.
MR. MARSHALL: You know, actually, if this is the same railroad station that I am thinking of,
there is still a kind of a railroad station there…
MR. GABRIELSON: There was one there the last time I’ve been by there.
MR. MARSHALL: And there’s a lumberyard not too far from there. It’s quite possible that it
could have been an offshoot of that original lumberyard.
MR. GABRIELSON: That big old railroad station had been there for a long time. I don’t know
if it’s there or not. I don’t travel that way much anymore.
BETTY MARSHALL: Isn’t Dunlauren farther out?
MR. GABRIELSON: Dunlauren wasn’t there then. We did get on the trolley once and go out to
Bluemont.
MR. MARSHALL: Where is that? The name rings a bell.
MR. GABRIELSON: It’s up on the edge of the Blue Ridge. It was a sort of a resort.
MRS. GABRIELSON: There was an old, old, railroad.
MR. GABRIELSON: The old railroad went first through Falls Church and then Vienna. There
was a little station here in Vienna for years. I don’t know whether it’s gone now or not. The
building is still there, but they don’t use it anymore.
MR. MARSHALL: Now, you’ve talked about using this transportation out from Washington to
where you were building the house, and then you’re talking about taking the same transportation
out to Bluemont. The thing that has concerned me for quite a long time; and we’ve only been
here since 1960 but that’s fourteen years. Here they had facility and that capability way back
then. And the even had it, as I understand it, during the Civil War. They had this sort of
capability. And now, when we need it they took it out! This doesn’t…I can understand it.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I’ll tell ya. There’s a lot of stories, and I don’t know how true they
are; but I do know that around New England where they had an interurban system that covered
all of Connecticut. When I was working up there in 1916, and stayed in Hartford or Norwalk, I
could get on an interurban car and go out into the country and start walking and collecting and
catch another interurban car after I’d walked five or ten miles, and go back into Norwalk. The
whole country was a network of them. The stories up there were that the railroad bought them
up and closed them down. Some of the big banks did too. Morgan and Company was one of
them that was blamed the most for it.
MR. MARSHALL: They just eliminated the competition.
MR. GABRIELSON: The stories I heard up there, and I have no verification, is that these
bankers would go out and buy these interurban roads for a song and then they’d sell, at a big
price, to the New Haven Railroad. They busted the New Haven Railroad.
MR. MARSHALL: Earlier you and I were talking about Model Ts. It strikes me that in
previous conversations, Clara has been telling us about some experiences she’s had with Model
Ts. I’d like you to think back and if you can remember some of those things you told us. There
was one time when you had a problem with a ground plug on a Model T. Can you remember
that? Tell me a little about your experiences with it will you?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, there isn’t much to tell. I learned to drive a Model T in about
1917. It was the first car I ever drove.
MR. GABRIELSON: It wasn’t that early I don’t think.
MRS. GABRIELSON: It was that summer that I was back with the baby and you were in New
England. Rush taught me to drive.
MR. GABRIELSON: That was 1916.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I never drove very much. In later years Ira got a car, but it had no started
on it. You had to crank it. If it was a cold morning I’d take a tea kettle full of boiling water out
and lifted the hood and poured the boiling water over this manifold. Then, I’d go round front you
see, and pull the choke out and crank it.
BETTY MARSHALL: Well, wouldn’t the water crack the engine?
MR. GABRIELSON: No the water would heat the engine up enough so the gas would vaporize.
BETTY MARSHALL: I was thinking that it would crack the metal.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well cars nowadays don’t have manifolds. They are much more
complicated.
MRS. GABRIELSON: One time, when I went out to crank, somehow the crank was loose from
the rod that would turn the motor. I lifted the hood and looked in. I saw the holes that
corresponded with this rod, and there was a pin that held it in there. Well, the pin wasn’t there.
So I put a nail in there and away I went. When I parked downtown, the fellows noticed that and
laughed about it. They thought it was funny.
MR. MARSHALL: A minute ago you were talking about the ground plug, and I am reminded
about something that you and I talked about a number of years ago. There was something about
how if you didn’t have a connection you couldn’t get the darned thing to fire.
MR. GABRIELSON: There was a magneto post.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, that’s what I was talking about.
MR. GABIELSON: It was set into the top of the crank case. I remember the first time I learned
about that was when I was driving in North Dakota. It wouldn’t start. So I carried my suitcase
in to Pierre, South Dakota.
MR. MARSHALL: How far?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was ten or fifteen miles. I got a guy to go back out there with me and
get the damned thing started again. Before he tried to start it again he took off this thing and took
a cutter pin off of the end of it and then it cranked all right. So after that, if anything went wrong
with the car I always took the magneto post out first to see if it was all right.
MR. MARSHALL: Let’s get on with where you two met. Did this take place down in Iowa?
MRS. GABIELSON: Well, I was in Church and I was the music. I played the organ and led the
singing.
MR. MARSHALL: What church was this and what town?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was a Methodist Church in Webb, Iowa. I think it was 1907.
MRS. GABRIELSON: We courted for quite a few years before we were married. I tell you, I
was about 18 at the time. It was very small town, and a little Church. For a time, they weren’t
able to support a Minister. For a time the minister from Sioux Rapids where he lived, came over
there on Sunday and conducted the Service in the afternoon. My parents were pillars of the
church and he always came to our place for a meal afterwards. He told us that there was a family
by the name of Gabrielson who were moving up there. They were going to be a mile and a half
out of town. They had three boys and they were fine people.
BETTY MARSHALL: You can just hear the girls say, “Fine boys, whoopee!”
MRS. GABRIELSON: Eventually I spotted Mr. and Mrs. Gabrielson. They were seated in the
back seat of the church. I knew who they were because I knew they were coming. Then one
Sunday there was a young man sitting between them. After the service, his mother introduced Ira
to me. And the first topic of conversation was about a picture that I had taken of the editor’s
daughter’s school. She was teaching at a one room country school and she asked me to go out
and take a picture of her children. That was the first topic of conversation!
MR. MARSHALL: Can you remember what kind of camera you used?
MRS. GABRIELSON: It was a box camera I guess. Sears Roebuck had advertised a whole
outfit. You got the camera and the plate holders and extra plates. You also got the equipment to
develop and dry and fix and print your own pictures. That’s what I used.
BETTY MARSHALL: You never had to the powder flash did you?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, no flash powder. That was available, but not for the general public.
MR. MARSHALL: So after his mother introduced you, what happened then?
MRS. GABRIELSON: I don’t know. My father decided that there was some sort of feeling
between us and he says, “Now listen daughter, I want you to understand, your mother doesn’t
want any young men hanging around!” Mother was pregnant. It was just two weeks after my
16th birthday that my brother arrived. The first Sunday after that, Ira asked he if might walk me
home. Now, bless you, we had little narrow sidewalks you know. We’d come to an alley, and
there were just two boards about that wide. Eventually he put an arm around me.
MR. MARSHALL: To keep you from falling on that narrow board!
MRS. GABRIELSON: The first time he ever asked me to go anywhere he asked me to go to
Merrison which was about ten miles away, to go to the 4th of July celebration. Well, there were
no cars you know. So that meant we had to go with the old horse and buggy; Old Buck was the
horse. He’d plod along. It takes time to travel that way. I asked my mother if I might go and
she said, “Well, yes, you may go if Cora goes too.” Cora is my sister. Ira has insisted for many
years that he made Guy take Cora. Guy is Ira’s brother.
MR. MARSHALL: Now let’s have Gabe pick up the story from here.
MR. GABRIELSON: I reasoned with Guy and the four of us went.
MR. MARSHALL: A double date! And this was in what kind of a rig?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was an old surrey type buggy. It was my dad’s.
MR. MARSHALL: Did you have to con him into letting you take it?
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh no, we drove it most any time we wanted to.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell how you used to come down and see us at night.
MR. GABRIELSON: Old Buck learned the way down there pretty quick! We’d work all day
on the farm and were pretty tired. We’d fall asleep coming into town and Old Buck would go
through town and pull up in front of their house and stop!
MR. MARSHALL: So actually, this double date thing started pretty early in the game didn’t it?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Oh yes.
BETTY MARSHALL: How many years did you court before you got married?
MR. GABRIELSON: We didn’t get married until after I got through college. I had just graduated
from high school when I came up there. I stayed out of school for a year to help dad on the farm.
MR. MARSHALL: Where was the farm?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was just a mile and a half outside of Webb. It was 160 acres. It was a
general Iowa farm. We raised corn and oats and hay. We fed the oats and hay to the horses and
used to corn to fed the hogs. It was a general farm.
MR. MARSHALL: What county was this in?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was Clay County, Iowa. Sioux City is about 100 miles north. It’s right
up close to the Minnesota line. There was only one county north of Clay county before the
Minnesota line.
MR. MARSHALL: What town in Minnesota would be familiar? Would in be Worthington?
No, that would be pretty far.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, there were no big towns in Minnesota then. You’d have to get up
quite a ways before you’d find anything. I remember there was a little place, but I can’t think of
the name of it. We were right south of the Okoboji Lakes.
MRS. GABIELSON: When we were married we spent our honeymoon at Okoboji Lakes.
MR. MARSHALL: Here we are in May of 1974 and we are getting to the period of the year
when we have a lot of thunderstorms; can you remember if there were any violent storms then?
MR. GABRIELSON: Lot’s of them.
MR. MARSHALL: This has pretty much a characteristic of that area hasn’t it?
MR. GABRIELSON: Always, every since I knew anything about it, and I grew up there. We
had lots of thunderstorms. And we had a lot of hail storms, and the occasional tornado.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I can remember sitting in the schoolroom and seeing a tornado going
around.
MR.GABRIELSON: I can remember as a small boy being at Church one Sunday afternoon for a
meeting and one of those hail storms came up. There were chunks of hail as big as my fist. They
busted every window on that side of the church that the storm was coming from.
MR. MARSHALL: Now, you were courting Clara, and your brother was courting her sister.
Then, you left to go to college. Where did you go?
MR. GABRIELSON: Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. Its south and west. It’s right at
the junction of the Missouri and the Big Sioux Rivers.
MR. MARSHALL: We used to go through all of the time going from Ardmore, OK to
Minneapolis. One thing we always thought interesting was a bridge there that had iron railings
and it made a special noise when you went over it.
MR. GABRIELSON: It goes across to a little town in Nebraska.
MR. MARSHALL: What did you take in college? What did you major in?
MR. GABRIELSON: I majored in Zoology.
MR. MARSHALL: What year did you graduate?
MR. GABRIELSON: I graduated in June of 1912. After I graduated I got a job teaching Biology
as Marshalltown, Iowa High School. I taught there for three years. Clara and I were married that
summer of 1912. I had worked my way through college, and as soon as I finished and got a job,
why, Clara and I got married on August 7th of 1912. The teaching job started in September of
1912. We moved to Marshalltown, Iowa and we lived there for three years while I taught high
school.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Here’s where Ira finally decided that if God had intended for him to be a
teacher, He would have built him different.
MR. GABRIELSON: I applied for a fellowship down at the University of Iowa and got it.
After we had moved down there, I got a telegram from the Biological Survey wanting to know if I
would accept the job as an Assistant Biologist at $75.00 a month and come to Washington.
MR. MARSHALL: What kind of place did you live in while you were in Marshalltown for
those three years?
MR. GABRIELSON: For the first year we lived in a single room in a private home. Well, it was
a two room apartment in a private home.
MRS. GABRIELSON: They fixed it up.
MR. GABRIELSON: The last year we were there we rented a furnished house. It was Old Man
Manning’s place.
MRS. GABRIELSON: That was the year that June was born.
MR. GABRIELSON: She was five months old when we came to Washington.
MR. MARSHALL: Let’s go back now to 1916.
MR. GABRIELSON: I spent most of 1916 working in Long Island, Connecticut and Rhode
Island on the Starlings. We built the house in Washington in 1917.
MR. MARSHALL: So let’s pick it up from there. After you got the house built…
MRS. GABRIELSON: Tell them about the scientists. They laughed so much. They couldn’t
believe that he could build a house. They were scientists strictly. Every weekend some of them
would come out. They wanted to come and see where we were living.
MR. MARSHALL: There men were from the Biological Survey?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, from the Survey. They wanted to see what kind of a place he had
built. They never failed to be shocked by the things that June would say. I remember one time
we were walking along and the editor was with us. He said, “There June, what’s that bird?” And
he thought she’d just tell him it was a “birdy”. She said, “That’s a [scientific name in Latin]!
MR. MARSHALL: That must have really floored him!
MRS. GABRIELSON: Each one of the scientists was specialized on a different kind of species
or bug or animal. Ira had found a big scarab beetle. There was a big hatch that that year. Finally
one day when someone was out, June called out, “Hey Daddy, there’s another [scientific name].”
She was only two and a half!
MR. GABRIELSON: I collected all, or most of the [bugs] in America were collected on our
screen door! This species had been described and were very scarce. All of a sudden there was a
big hatch right there.
BETTY MARSHALL: How many times did this happen?
MR. GABRIELSON: Never again, it happened just that one year.
BETTY MARSHALL: I was wondering about that because we do have the seventeen year
cicadas. That was really something to experience. I enjoyed it.
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, it comes every seventeen years. There are some of those bugs
every year, but the big hatch is every seventeen years. I’ve seen it twice since we’ve lived on
this place.
MRS. GABRIELSON: The scientist soon learned that I had chickens. I’d fix chicken for dinner.
I remember one time when Ira was gone. We were living out in the woods really and there were
raccoons and opossums around. My chickens were young. It was the season of the year when I
had some young ones around. They didn’t go into the chicken house and roost where they
should have. They’d stay out in the brush. I used to have to go out and pick them up and throw
them in you know. One time I did that and accidentally broke the leg of a chicken. Well, I just
thought that’s too bad to let that chicken live that way. So I took and cut its head off and cleaned
it and dressed it and cooked it. After that, June used to beg me to break another chicken’s leg.
BETTY MARSHALL: What happened to your third brother? Weren’t there three boys in the
family?
MRS. GABRIELSON: There was Gabe and Guy and the younger one was Rush. He still lives
in northern Iowa. He became cashier and then President of a bank. He now has retired. He sells
insurance.
MR. MARSHALL: Guy eventually married your sister didn’t he?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, they have always lived in New Jersey. They were married in 1918.
They lived there until she died last fall. Guy is still there.
MR. MARSHALL: Oh that’s right. I had forgotten that she has passed away.
BETTY MARSHALL: How many children did they have?
MRS. GABRIELSON: They had two; a son and a daughter. The son is now President of
Nicolette Asbestos Company. They do a lot of traveling. They own property in Columbia.
Guy had two or three companies. He had Nicolette and they made this water heater down here.
I can’t remember the name of the company. After Guy met Cora, he went to the University of
Iowa and finished there. Then he went to Boston and went to Harvard, and finished Harvard
Law and School of Oratory. He also went through the Business Administration studies.
MR. GABRIELSON: Dad sold the farm. My younger brother was there but he wasn’t very
strong. He was more like mother’s folks. He wasn’t big and hulky like Guy and I were.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Dad Gabrielson went and bought that bank in Crystal Lake.
BETTY MARSHALL: Is that where Rush went?
MR. GABRIELSON: That’s where Rush is now. He’s not in the bank any more. He sold his
interest in it. He still lives in it.
MRS. GABRIELSON: He still owns the bank building.
MR. MARSHALL: He’s married. And he’s got a boy and two girls. The boy has never been
right. He’s had some sort of mental trouble ever since he was a baby. He died some years ago.
He had to be in an institution for years.
MRS. GABRIELSON: The two daughters now live in New Jersey.
MR. GABRIELSON: One daughter does. The other daughter lives in Minnesota. She went to
New Jersey but she didn’t stay. Dorothy is married to a fellow who is a football coach in Wells,
Minnesota. Its a little school, but they’ve won the state championship every once in a while.
MR. MARSHALL: I think that name rings a bell. Now, let’s go back a little bit. You had gone
back to school again, but left and came to Washington. Then you went to Portland for a number
of years?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, we were here in Washington for three years, from October of 1915 to
the summer of 1918. Then, because of the war, I was to go out and fill a vacancy they had in the
Dakotas, trying to control prairie dogs. I went out there, and then I got ordered to take over
South Dakota. I was in the Black Hills in Rapid City I think it was, looking for a place to live.
Clara was at my Dad’s in Crystal Lake. I got a telegram from E. W. Nelson, who was Chief of the
Bureau, wanting to know if I would go to Oregon instead of setting up an office in South Dakota.
They had some trouble out there. I didn’t know anything about Oregon except where it was on
the map. So I called Clara and asked her if she was willing to go out there and take a stab at it.
She said yes, so I called Nelson, or sent him a telegram. I told him, “I don’t know anything about
Oregon, but it can’t be any worse than South Dakota. I’ll take a chance at it.” We landed in
Oregon about three days before Christmas. I went up to Fargo and checked out my stuff to
[unintelligible] and then they told me to stop in Boise and get some information about the rodents
that I was supposed to work on. I stopped there, and while I was there Clara and June both
came down with the flu in that 1918 epidemic. We were staying in a hotel. I couldn’t get them
into a hospital. The hotel people tried to throw me out. I wouldn’t go. They finally agreed to
let me stay if the doctor would come up the back elevator. They finally got so that they could
travel and we got on the train and went to Corvallis, Oregon. We got to Portland. It was
snowing like hell when we passed over the Blue Mountains near LeGrand, Oregon. When we got
to Portland it was raining. I got them into a hotel right close to the station. They had these
interurban trains all over western Oregon, and the next morning we got on the interurban. It was
just three or four days before Christmas. It was a very short time, I don’t really remember. We
got out of that car downtown, and the roses were in bloom all along the street. We had left Fargo
when in was about forty below. We decided right then that Oregon was okay. We went down to
Corvallis and lived there. I worked out of the Extension Service office for about six months.
Then we moved up to Portland and moved into the Service office. There were two people there
besides myself. Stanley Jewitt who was working on predator animals, and the Game Warden.
There were three of us. We had a little office in the Post Office building. We stayed there for
seventeen years. During that time, I worked mostly as rodent control problems, finding out how
to control rodents. We did an awful lot of research work.
MRS. GABRIELSON: They didn’t know what rodents were there. And nobody knew. And
they didn’t know how to control them.
MR. GABRIELSON: We used poisoning and trapping to try and control them. We tried
everything. We developed a lot of the methods that were used for years before they developed
some of these modern ways. One of the things that we stopped was this; all of the grain farmers
up there were using phosphorus on wheat. They were killing all of the songbirds. They were
killing everything. This was being done by the farmers. We got a combination of strychnine and
oats. The small birds won’t eat oats very much, and strychnine doesn’t kill birds very much.
Any bird that’s got a crop is pretty near immune to strychnine. Chickens are immune. You can
hardly stuff enough strychnine into a chicken to kill him. So we got the farmers to change. My
biggest job was to get the farmers to use that. We used to go out and do demonstrations. We
used to tricks. One of the funny things was that we found two ground squirrels that had
different feeding habits. One of them would pick up a grain of oats and take the shell off before
he put it in his mouth. The other one would pick up a dozen of them and stick them in his cheek
pouches. The paste that we put it on with would dissolve and kill him before he ever swallowed
it. So, we devised a brittle flour paste for the one that shelled it. He shelled off enough. I used
to go out and tell the farmers that I’ll kill the big squirrels, but I won’t bother the little ones. Or,
kill the little ones and not the big ones. I’d use the oats with the starch paste on. The big ones
would pick it up and you’d see them eating it. They’d run around and have a good time. The
little ones would die. They were two different sizes. Then I’d say, “Now, we’ll kill them both.”
I’d put out the flower paste and get both of them. The farmers were very much impressed.
BETTY MARSHALL: Are squirrels rodents? They don’t go up in the trees?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, they are rodents. They don’t go up in the trees at all. They burrow
in the ground. There were enormous numbers of them. We couldn’t find a grain field in Oregon
that didn’t have a big swath eaten into it by the ground squirrels that had their nests along the
fence rows.
BETTY MARSHALL: Do they vary much from a chipmunk?
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, they are much bigger. They have many, many species. Some of
them are very pretty animals. Some are not, but they have dozens of species of them.
BETTY MARSHALL: They’re not blind like a mole?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, they burrow and have their nests in the ground, but they do they’re
feeding and all of their running around on top of the ground. They feed during the day. They are
not nocturnal; most of them. There are some that are, but most of them are not.
MR. MARSHALL: How long did you stay in Oregon?
MR. GABRIELSON: We stayed until 1935.
MR. MARSHALL: Then what happened?
MR. GABRIELSON: I got a telegram from Ding Darling who was the Chief of the Bureau. He
said that he had completed his reorganization of the Bureau and it meant a new assignment in
Washington for me, and that he hoped I liked it.
MR. MARSHALL: What did you tell him?
MR. GABRIELSON: I came damn near telling him to go to hell and quitting the Bureau! I liked
it in Oregon!
MRS. GABRIELSON: By that time he had become Regional Director. He was in charge of the
all of the work of the Bureau in Washington, California, Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. He had a
little empire of his own. They didn’t have money enough to go out and check on him.
MR. GABRIELSON: I was running the show all by my lonesome. I came near telling him to
forget it. Sometimes I thought the worst decision I ever made in my life was to come back east.
MR. MARSHALL: Well, I don’t know. If you hadn’t of come back east, we wouldn’t have got
to know you probably.
MR. GABRIELSON: I came back here in 1935 in February as assistant chief of the Research
Division. I don’t think I ever worked at it. I had an office there. Darling would come and say to
me every once in a while, “Here, I want you to do this.” It has nothing to do with my work. He
sent me on all kinds of crazy stunts. He called me up one morning about nine o’clock and said
that he was in trouble. “I’ve got a conflict.” I’m supposed to be at the White House at ten
o’clock and I’m supposed to be in front of some damned House Committee. He said, “You’ll
have to go before the Committee. I asked him, “Well what Committee is it?” He said, “I don’t
know, you’ll have to find out!” I asked him what they were talking about, he said he didn’t
know that either. So, I had to find out, and finally did. I couldn’t think of what I was going to
say in the taxi on the way up there. But I got by because I knew more about it than the
Committee did.
BETTY MARSHALL: Would you know what year Mount Rushmore was carved out?
MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t remember. I remember when it was built. I was in the Black Hills
in 1916. They hadn’t started working on it then. It was in the 1930’s sometime.
MR. MARSHALL: When you came back to Washington and were working for Ding Darling,
where did you live then?
MR. GABRIELSON: I rented a room for a little while from one of the fellows in the Bureau
because Clara and the kids were still out in Oregon.
MRS. GABRIELSON: I stayed there until the girls were out of school.
MR. GABRIELSON: She drove east by herself.
MR. MARSHALL: In a Model T?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, in a Model A.
BETTY MARSHALL: How many kids did you have then?
MRS. GABRIELSON: I had four.
[End of tape 1]
MR. GABRIELSON: I had been given another job. Ding called me in one day and said, “I got
$35,000.00 from the American Wildlife Institute and $30,000.00 from Congress. I want you do
go out and set up some cooperative wildlife research units. I asked him, “what’s a cooperative
wildlife research unit?’ He says, “I don’t know, you’ll have to do find out!” Then only think I
knew about that was going on anything like it was out in [unintelligible]. So I went out there and
talked to those fellows and found out what they were doing. I also found out the kind of courses
you have to have to train wildlife people. I started out. First, I tried to put the nine units we had
money to finance in different ecological areas so we could take full advantage of it. The original
idea was that we’d get several states to contribute money to it. That never worked out. The
state laws won’t let them. I found out ways to beat it, but that was much later. I started out to
set up these units, and I was up at Oreno, Maine setting up a unit up there when Clara was
driving east. I met her at Guy’s house in New Jersey after I had finished setting up the unit in
Oreno. What I had to do, it seems now that it would be impossible, but it worked. I had to get
the State Agricultural College and the Game Department to join the old Biological Survey, and the
American Wildlife Institute which was the predecessor of the Wildlife Management Institute to
meet together and agree on a program to finance it jointly.
[tape skips]
MR. MARSHALL: This is May 31, 1974. On Side two we had just begun talking about how
Ding Darling had told Gabe to go out and establish a cooperative wildlife unit. We’re going to
pick up at that point.
MR. GABRIELSON: I had to set up nine of them. I had seven up them set up and Virginia was
one of them; out at Blacksburg. I had packed my suitcase and bought a ticket. I had all of the
arrangements for the Game Departments in Oregon and Utah, and the college people to meet me.
I had gone downtown. I was going to take the afternoon B&O train to Chicago. I said goodbye
to the family. Along about noon, the telephone rang. It was Ding. He asked when I was going
on the western trip. I told him I was leaving that afternoon. He said, “You’ll have to cancel it.”
I told him I’d only be gone ten days and asked him if whatever he had wouldn’t keep until I got
back. I had all of the arrangements made. “No,” he said, “You can’t”. I told him it was going to
cost him a lot of money in telegrams and telephone calls. But I canceled it. I asked him what he
wanted me to do. He said, “You just stay there until I come in.” I asked him where he was and
he said, “I’m out I the sticks.” In ten days or so, he came in. He called me and asked me to come
up to his office. “I want to talk to you”. It was a hot day in early October. I had no necktie on.
If I did, it was hanging down, but I started for his office.
MR. MARSHALL: What year was this?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was 1935. I got part way up to his office and he came out waved his
arms and said, “Go get your coat on, we’ve got to go up to the Secretaries Office”. Well that
didn’t surprise me because any time anything from the west came up he took me along because I
knew more about it than anybody in the Washington office. I had spent a lot of years out there.
Usually, he’d tell me about it. But he began to ask me about Clara and the kids and how I felt.
He never said a word about what we were going to talk about. Finally, I said, “Say Ding, what’s
the row about this time?” He said, “Oh there’s no row this time. We’re just changing Chiefs of
the Bureau and you’re the new Chief.”
BETTY MARSHALL: Wow, can you imagine?
MR. GABRIELSON: I said, “Jesus Christ!”
BETTY MARSHALL: So now were you taking his place?
MR. GABIELSON: Yeah! He was just stepping out.
MR. MARSHALL: Who was the Secretary?
MR. GABRIELSON: Henry Wallace. So what Ding was trying to do; I’ve always accused him
of it, and he always denied it; but he had arranged this all with Wallace. He tried to get me to
walk in there, and have Wallace congratulate me or say something to me and me in total ignorance
of it. If I hadn’t of asked a straight question that would have happened. I got in there and
Wallace stuck out his hand and said, “Congratulations on your new job!”
BETTY MARSHALL: Now is he the one who ran…..?
MRS. GABIELSON: He ran for President.
MR. GABIELSON: He was the Secretary of Agriculture. He ran for President on a liberal party
ticket. He ran at the time that Roosevelt was running for reelection, and Landen from Kansas
was running too.
MR. MARSHALL: So, this was October 1935, and Wallace congratulated you as being the
new…
MR. GABRIELSON: Then he asked me what my new policies were going to be in my new job.
MR. MARSHALL: What was your new title going to be?
MR. GABRIELSON: Chief of the Biological Survey. I said, “Mr. Secretary, I don’t know. Mr.
Darling just told me outside the door!” He said, “Well, I’m going to tell you; I don’t know
anything about this wildlife work. Ding says you do. You take it and run it and if there is any
time I can help you, why you call on me.”
MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that great?
BETTY MARSHALL: Was he pretty knowledgeable about the subject?
MR. GABRIELSON: He didn’t know anything about it!
MRS. GABRIELSON: But he knew he didn’t.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s the point see. What did you think about this Clara?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Oh, I was very, very pleased of course. It meant recognition for Ira.
He’d always been away from home. I knew that would go on. But he just visited once in a
while. So that’s the way it went.
BETTY MARSHALL: So you set up nine or ten of these cooperative units. How many of
them are there today?
MR. GABRIELSON: There are eighteen.
BETTY MARSHALL: But they are regional things still?
MR. GABRIELSON: They still try to keep them in different ecological areas.
MR. MARSHALL: You might explain how these things are funded. If I’m not mistaken it’s
funding not only by the Wildlife Management Institute….
MR. GABIELSON: ….by the Biological Survey, the Agricultural College and the State Game
Department.
MR. MARSHALL: So in other words in Virginia, at Blacksburg, the Game Commission funds it,
the WMI funds it, and so does the college.
MR. GABRIELSON: The FWS does too.
MR. MARSHALL: So four groups fund it. Can you describe a little bit about what they do?
MR. GABRIELSON: They were set up to do three things. One was to train people for work in
the wildlife field. That was one objective. Another was to do a lot of the fact finding that the
states had not been equipped to do. The other was to do practical research; not just purely
theoretical. Another objective was to set up demonstration areas to show how it as down. None
have them have ever done very much in the demonstration department.
MR. MARSHALL: But they do quite a bit.
MR. GABRIELSON: They do a lot of research work.
MR. MARSHALL: Sometimes, if we have a problem, we can go to them and say that
‘something is happening with the pheasant, could you do a study’? So it works out.
MR. GABRIELSON: The programs have always been oriented towards local problems of that
Game Department, where ever it is. But the fund of knowledge that they have provided and the
number of men that they’ve trained; I don’t know how many now; but about the time I left the
Bureau in 1946 there was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 trained men who had come
out of these units.
BETTY MARSHALL: Did you say once that you have trained some men from Canada?
MR. GABRIELSON: We brought a lot of them down here. They’d get their training. I got
mixed up in a Canadian outfit. There was an outfit called CIL, Canadian International Company.
According to them they were always being badgered. The man I first talked to has been dead for
many years, but he came to me and said, “Isn’t there something we can do with our money that
will help wildlife more than provide beer for Christmas parties?” I told me that there were a lot
of things, and he asked me to write up two or three for him. I wrote two or three outlines of
things and sent them to him. One of them was setting up training schools. There was no school
in Canada where they could get any training. One of them was patterned on this Wildlife school.
They fooled around with it for several years, because they were in some law suits. But one day
they called me and said that they were ready to talk business and they wanted me to come up
and talk to the Board of Directors. I went up to Montreal and talked to them. After several
weeks, my telephone rang one day. This was after I was with the WMI. They said that they
had decided to take this training thing that I outlined. Canadian students all had to come down
here to get their education. We’re going to go with it on two conditions. The first is that if you
will be Chairman of the Committee that handles it. I told them they were crazy and that they
didn’t want an American for that job. This was when the anti-American stuff was getting
started. I said that there would be some resentment among Canadians. They said that they had
thought of that and they wouldn’t put any money into it unless I was the Chairman. I asked
them what the other condition was. They said I was supposed to pick a Canadian to work with
me. They said that they would give me some time to find someone. I told them that I already
know someone in Canada that I could work very well with if they could get him. It was Orris [?]
Lloyd. I gave them his address and he agreed to it. He and I spent one hell of a lot of that
money. We had 15 schools now in Canada, giving training to wildlife people. This went on until
the cut out the program last year.
BETTY MARSHALL: They just cut it out?
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, they had accomplished their objective. They’ve got the colleges, and
the Canadian government, and the Provinces are giving fellowships. It’s an automatic thing now.
We had a little money to give fellowships and to get started. They are using their money to
promote progress.
MR. MARSHALL: So now, let’s go back a moment. You stayed on as Chief of the Bureau until
1946. Then you went with the Institute? What promoted this now?
MR. GABRIELSON: Largely, it was my doctor. From the outbreak of the war in 1941, and in
1940 they combined the wildlife service and the fisheries service into the Fish and Wildlife
Service. They moved both of them into Interior and I was Chief of the outfit. When we got
involved in the European war, they moved the Park Service and us, and the Bureau of Animal
Industry out to Chicago and put us in the old Merchandise Mart. Just after we moved out there,
we had sold our house. Just after we got out there, why, they set up under the War Powers Act
the Fisheries Commission. They made Ickes the head of it, and me the Deputy and I did all of
the work. So I commuted from Chicago to Washington and a lot of other places. I hardly slept in
the same bed twice. I had always had some gall bladder trouble. And it got so bad that my
doctor told me, “Now listen, you either quit that damned job or get a new doctor because you are
wasting my time and your money. I can’t do anything to help you, living the way you do.” So I
went to talk to old man Ickes, who was my boss then. I arranged to step down and do some
writing. I was to be a senior biologist. About that time, these guys started to pester me to take
that job. I turned them down time and time again. They kept offering me more money. I told
them it wasn’t a question of money. I told them that I had my plans all laid out. They offered
me so much money that I couldn’t turn it down. I finally agreed to go in 1946. Then I found out
afterwards that the reason that they kept after me was that I was the only one that all of the
contributors could agree on.
BETTY MARSHALL: Was Rockefeller into the Institute when it was still the American
Wildlife Institute?
MR. GABRIELSON: No, he’s never been involved with it. This was a different thing. It goes
back to 1911 when a group of people were distressed at what was happening to wildlife in
America. They formed an organization called the American Game Protective Association. It was
mostly a bunch of wealthy people. I don’t know who they hired first, but they had Seth
Gordon. They had Paul Miller, and Locke, and several people. They changed their name once to
the American Game Association. Then there got to be a fight between some of the supporters.
It split into two. One bunch which was mostly DuPont supporters and their allies like
Remington Arms and Eastman Kodak and two or three railroads called it the American Wildlife
Institute. The other group set up a separate program based mostly on the propagation of game.
It was out in southern Illinois, and mostly financed by the Ollin [?] people and some others. I
don’t know too much about the history of that one because I never had too much to do with it.
In 1945, they commenced to want to get together again. There was one man in Ollin and one man
in Remington that worked on it until they finally got everybody to agree to unite the two
programs. They set up a new joint program and I was the guy who was picked to run it.
MR. MARSHALL: Something that I know only vaguely about is that the field people like Larry
Young who was out at Horicon Marsh for a long time before you brought him in here. And I
know guys like Phil Barsky who were the field men …..
MR. GABRIELSON: ….of the Wildlife Management Institute.
MR. MARSHALL: Those are the regional guys. There are from four to six or seven of them.
BETTY MARSHALL: What was Rockefeller tied into?
MR. MARSHALL: Was it the World Wildlife Fund?
MR. GABRIELSON: Lawrence has never been in that except that he contributed. He took
several little park organizations and combined them in to the present Parks and Recreation
Association. He set it up. Dwight Redding was chairman of that for a long time.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s what Rusty Groh worked at for a long while before he left. So you
stayed with the Wildlife Management Institute, but in the mean time you were also involved with
the World Wildlife Fund and with Lindbergh and Fritz Phillips and all of that. Are you still
involved with them?
MR. GABRIELSON: I’m still a member of the Board. I’ve gotten out working at any office, but
I’m still a member of the Board. And, I’m honorary President of the American Wildlife Fund.
MR. MARSHALL: So you were President at the Wildlife Management Institute until when?
MR. GABRIELSON: Until 1970.
MR. MARSHALL: That was when Dan Poole came in right?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah.
MR. MARSHALL: When you were in there Pink Guteruss was the Vice President right?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, he was. Dan Poole was the Secretary.
MR. MARSHALL: So when you stepped out Dan came in as President. Larry Yahn came in
from Wisconsin to take Dan’s place. Lonnie Williamson came in as editor of the newsletter.
You’ve seen a lot haven’t you Gabe?
MR. GABRIELSON: Yes, I have. I’ve built the Wildlife Management Institute.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, I know you did.
MR. GABRIELSON: I think that we’ve been talking for about an hour and a half or two hours,
and we’ve covered a lot of things. But there are so many things I’d like to talk about, and
questions I can’t even begin to think of right now. One of the things that we’ve touched on many
times in our talks is your back pack experiences around the country. I never cease to be amazed
when we might be talking about a certain place and you immediately come out with how you
know the place intimately having been there. You can describe the flora and fauna. I think that’s
just great.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I covered North America pretty well in the field work that I’ve
done. I enjoy it. That’s the thing that I enjoyed more than anything else; being outdoors. I’ve
got a pretty good working knowledge of plants.
MR. MARHSALL: I think you have!
MR. GABRIELSON: I know bugs and things like that. There used to be a lot of fellows like
that. We called them ‘all around naturalists’. But there’s darn few of them now.
MR. MARSHALL: That’s right. One of the questions that is bugging so many people
nowadays especially in the business that we’re in; and that is people like us and people that hunt
and fish talk to each other and we agree. But the thing that concerns us is that there is such a
movement for anti-hunting. How do we combat this?
MR. GABRIELSON: I think that this is the inevitable result of the movement of people into
cities. In my boyhood days, this was an agricultural country. The majority of people lived on
the land and knew something about wildlife. They might not very much, but they knew the
animals that were around them. They were mostly farmers or people in small towns who dealt
with farmers all of the time. They knew something about the life cycles of animals. These
people in the city don’t know a banana from a potato. This is the basic problem. Then, you’ve
got a lot of emotional people who get very excited and emotional. You have to get emotional
about something and a lot of them get emotional about wildlife. They get to the point where
they….I’ve known people who thought it was terrible to kill anything. They wouldn’t even kill
a mosquito. If one landed on their arm, they’d brush it off. They carry it to an extreme.
MR. MARSHALL: But they are great steak eaters.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, when they start in on me, I say ‘well, how much meat do you eat?’
And then I tell them that they are not very consistent because something had to die to provide
that meat.
MR. MARSHALL: It just never occurred to them.
MR. GABRIELSON: They don’t want to think about it. There is only one man I’ve ever met;
and I’m not going to use his name because I have a lot of respect for his consistence; he won’t
wear leather shoes because that’s the hide of an animal. He’ll wear sneakers or canvas shoes or
some synthetics. He won’t eat meat of any kind. He won’t eat anything where something had to
die to provide it to him. Henry Wallace was one of them. He was a complete vegetarian. He
would eat eggs, and drink milk and he would eat cheese. I had lunch with him many times and I
never saw him eat anything other than vegetables and fruit.
BETTY MARSHALL: Wasn’t he a big man?
MR. GABRIELSON: He was a tall gangly man. I had a lot of respect for Henry Wallace. I
didn’t agree with his philosophy a lot but I’ve never known a man who lived up to his basic
philosophy better than he did. He never swore. He was a fine human being.
[Mrs. G. reminds Mr. G of something having to do with Mr. Wallace-unintelligible]
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, that was just a freak thing. I was always interested in those plants.
I’d always try to bring them home and try to grow them. I had quite a collection of them.
MRS. GABRIELSON: We happened to have a place where the soil was well drained. It was in
an old river valley. Those mountain plants would grow there.
MR. GABRIELSON: I was growing them and playing with them all of the time we were there. I
had an uncle came out there. He had lost his business. He had been married to a woman who
divorced him and pretty well cleaned him out. He came out to Portland and saw my plants at
just about the time that the rock garden craze started in Portland. He came out with people who
wanted to buy these plants. I wasn’t in the business. Finally, John said, “Why don’t we start a
nursery? I’ll do the work; you just show me the plants.” So, we started a nursery. I showed
him what to do with them and how to propagate them. I had five acres of ground so we started a
nursery. We began to sell those plants. The wealthy women in town commenced to come out
there prowl all over the place. We got one contract to build a gigantic rock garden for a very
wealthy man. I think we sold him nearly everything we had that was ready to sell. I went to
other nurseries and bought more. I think we did about $20,000.00 worth of work for him. One
of the women who came kept wanting to out in the field with me. Well, I was working and I
didn’t have time to drag a woman around with me. She was a married woman too. And I was
married too. One day I was down in Grants Pass, Oregon working. I came in from the field all
tired and dirty and Kirk says, “You wife is up in your room.” I said, “You’re crazy! My wife
was in Portland with the kids.” He said, “Well, she said she was your wife, and I gave her a
key.” So, I took another key and sure enough Clara was there! I said, “What in the hell are you
doing here?” She said, “Mrs. Berry somehow found out that you were down here in southern
Oregon.” The Siskew Mountains are a very old mountain range. And they’d got a whole flora of
plants that are not found anywhere else in the world. I was working there. She had gone and
found Clara and got a babysitter and brought her down to be there, so she could go out in the field
with me.
MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that beautiful!
MR. GABRIELSON: So I took her out with me and showed her all of these plants and she went
ape! Just nuts! The next day was Sunday so I took her out and showed her these plants. She
went to England where there was a fellow running a very fancy English garden magazine that she
was acquainted with. She started telling him about this trip and what she had seen. He asked her
to write an article about it. She told she couldn’t do it, but she gave him my name. I got a letter
from this guy wanting to know if I would do an article about the alpine plants in this area of
Oregon. So I wrote the article, and sent some photos of the area I had taken. He sent me a thing
that looked thing that looked like a horse blanket. So I began to write a lot of articles for this
magazine. I don’t know how it started, but there was a fellow who ran a printing office in
Harrisburg, and he was the father of the American Rose Society. I can’t remember his name. He
wrote to me and told me that he had corresponded with the guy Cox, over in England. He wanted
a piece on Alpine plants in North America. And he had asked this fellow in England to write
something. He told me that the fellow in England wrote him back and told him that I was the
only man in North America that could do it. I expect that there were lots of people, but I
happened to be the only one that Cox knew. So this fellow wrote to me and said that he wanted
me to do a monograph on American Alpine plants. He said he’d publish it if I would write it. I
said, “Hell no!” I didn’t have any time to do a monograph. Finally I got a letter from his
assistant, wanting to know if I ever came east. I had orders to go to Washington then. I said,
“Yes, I’ll be back there in a few months.” And he said that he thought there was a
misunderstanding. So I stopped in Harrisburg at this outfit’s headquarters. I talked to them and
decided to write that book. That book was written on the train between Washington and
Portland, Oregon mostly.
MR. MARSHALL: This is called, Western American Alpines, by Ira Gabrielson; published in
1932 by MacMillan and Company. There is a forward by H. M. Cox of London.
MR. GABRIELSON: That’s the fellow!
MR. MARSHALL: [reading] … “He never hesitates from stating his opinion of a plants beauty
and possibilities for the garden. And I for one am perfectly content to abide by his judgment.”
I think this pretty well sums up what a lot of people think about Gabe and Clara! Yes indeed.
MR. GABRIELSON: And I wrote most of it on the train!
MR. MARSHALL: And speaking of writing, you know I asked you a number of years ago if
you had any extra copies of your book on game management. You didn’t have any. But I found
an old weather beaten copy down in Virginia somewhere. I meant to bring it over tonight so you
could autograph it for me, but I’m going to bring it some other time. It’s not in very good shape
but it’s a good book anyway.
MRS. GABRIELSON: Have you got a copy of “A Little Bird Book”?
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, I’ve got a copy in there unless the kids have carried it off.
I’ve got a copy and it has Ira Gabrielson in it. It’s one of those little….
MR. GABRIELSON: It’s in that Golden Nature Series. I wrote the first one.
MR. MARSHALL: We ought to bring that one out too.
MRS. GABRIELSON: That little book has made him more money than anything else.
MR. GABRIELSON: They’ve sold over 5 million copies of that. It called “Birds”. I’ve got a
note from one of the people in the office from about a year ago saying, “You’ll be interested to
know that this check covers the five millionth copy of your book that has been printed.”
MR. MARSHALL: Incredible! When did you first write it?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was published in about 1950 or 1951; after the end of the World War.
MR. MARSHALL: How many books have you written, roughly?
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I don’t know. There were three MacMillan books, the little bird
book, and a book which was not published by MacMillan; they sold it to MacMillan. I can’t
think of the name of it. Old Horace McFarland. There was Birds of Alaska, and Birds of Oregon.
I edited the Fisherman’s Encyclopedia, and I wrote most of it.
MR. MARSHALL: I remember you told me about that one.
MR. GABRIELSON: I wrote part of the Taylor’s Garden Encyclopedia.
BETTY MARSHALL: Would you say that you had awful good science teachers when you were
in college?
MR. GABRIELSON: I never took any botany in school. I knew more about birds than my boss
the zoologist.
BETTY MARSHALL: Well, where did you learn it from?
MR. GABRIELSON: I just learned it. When I was a kid, I had names for the birds. I had no
books.
BETTY MARSHALL: Well where did you get the names?
MR. GABRIELSON: I made them out of my head!
MR. MARSHALL: He had a way to classify them in his own way.
MR. GABRIELSON: I got to know the birds that were around where I was living. There were
no bird books like you have now. I had names of my own for them. The first book I got my
mother bought for me. It wasn’t a very good bird book, but I thought it was wonderful. It was
Apgar’s Birds of the Eastern United States. Mother found it somewhere and got it for me.
MR. MARSHALL: How old were you then?
MR. GABRIELSON: Oh, I was about 14 of 15.
MR. MARSHALL: Back in Iowa.
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah. And I can’t remember when I didn’t know about plants. Mother
was a gardener and a damned good one. She gave me a little patch of land out behind the house
and I had all of the wildflowers growing that I liked from along the Little Sioux River.
BETTY MARSHALL: I’ve tried, but never been too successful in our yard. I know that the
daisies do better in the sun.
MR. GABRIELSON: Yeah, most of the daisies like the sunlight. There is one that will grow in
the shade but it’s not a very pretty one.
MRS. GABRIELSON: [unintelligible]….they’ve sent some people, some botanists to learn all
about these plants that he has put in. One of them said, “Oh, what a botanist you are!” And Ira
says, “I’m not a botanist at all!”
BETTY MARSHALL: Just by nature you turned out to be.
MR. GABRIELSON: I just know plants.
MR. MARSHALL: I’d like to get some holly from you some time.
MR. GABRIELSON: I’ve got lots of little seedlings.
MR. MARSHALL: Have you?
MR. GABRIELSON: Sure. They come up all over the place. If you want some, I’ll take a
spade and fix it so you could move them in the fall. I don’t think you’d better move them move
them now it’s late. I filled Larry’s yard.
MR. MARSHALL: I know. He’s very proud of the stuff that you have given him. He’s got a
lot of things coming on now.
MR.GABRIELSON: I’ve given a lot of people holly, but you’ve got to root trim them a year
before.
MRS. GABRIELSON: And you’ve got to prune the tops as well.
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, after you dig them you do. The leaves are there to stimulate growth
of the new feeder roots until you have a ball of them. Tomorrow, I’ll go and dig some holes
around them.
MR. MARSHALL: Speaking of tomorrow, it’s getting late and maybe we ought to be moving
along here.
MR. GABIELSON: You don’t have to go. My bedtime is midnight!
BETTY MARSHALL: Do you have a favorite TV show?
MR. GABRIELSON: I don’t ever watch television. We don’t have a TV that’s any good.
BETTY MARSHALL: We don’t either! The best one we had was one that the neighbors were
going to throw in the garbage.
MRS. GABRIELSON: We have one that June had here. But I don’t know how to turn in on.
MR. GABRIELSON: I tell you, all of the writing I’ve ever done, I’ve done at night.
MR. MARSHALL: Me too.
MR. GABRIELSON: Listening to that damn stuff interferes with my work habits. I’ve gotten
more fun out of life than any individual is entitled to.
MRS. GABRIELSON: He always says that throughout his life he’s done everything he would
have been doing if he were independently wealthy.
MR. MARSHALL: Isn’t that wonderful! That’s a great thing to be able to say! We talked
about going back and forth to Richmond. I am enjoying what I am doing down there. But I am
not enjoying the commute and so forth. I’m kind of torn between two desires. We like it up
here, and ….
MR. GABRIELSON: Well, you just move the Game Department up here!
MR. MARSHALL: That’s a good idea. Except I think they’d all commit suicide if they had to
come up here!
MR. GABRIELSON: Tell them to come to Northern Virginia; they don’t have to go to work!
BETTY MARSHALL: Northern Virginia is an awful word! It’s Northern Virginia versus
Richmond like the north and south again!
MR. GABRIELSON: Northern Virginia is a foreign country as far and the southern half of
Virginia is concerned.
MR. MARSHALL: You’re right! South of Fredericksburg is a no mans land. So I have a
passport so I can go between!
BETTY MARSHALL: In the winter, spring, fall, you name it, they can have ten inches of snow
in Richmond, and would any local station talk about it? We won’t have any, but we’d never
know that they did because the radio stations won’t talk about it.
MR. GABRIELSON: Richmond gets more snow that we do because they are closer to the
mountains.
MR. MARSHALL: It’s amazing. It’s called the fall line.
MR. GABRIELSON: We sometimes get the effects of the storms that come from the west.
Generally those storms come this way and go out the St. Lawrence Valley. We get the southern
edge of them. The storms that produce the most snow come up the coast. And as they come,
they swing east of here. Sometimes they get more snow in Norfolk than we get here.
MR. MARSHALL: I am looking now at a picture that Clara just showed me. It’s their wedding
picture. This was in Iowa in August of 1912. This is beautiful. And this one is 50 years later!
MRS. GABRIELSON: It was taken right here.
MR. MARSHALL: Well that is just beautiful.
MRS. GABRIELSON: You can’t imagine we are the same people!
MR. MARSHALL: You’ve had a very interesting time haven’t you?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, all our lives. This summer it will be 62 years that we’ve been
married.
MR. MARSHALL: Good heavens! You know one thing I wanted to ask you was about how
you got started going up to that place in Canada. It’s in Quebec isn’t it?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Yes, it is. Messine is the Post Office. When we first went there, it was
Messine, but if you sent a telegram the railroad had to go to Burbedge. It was right in the same
place.
MR. MARSHALL: When did you get that place?
MRS. GABRIELSON: Well, Ira was Director of the old Biological Survey. And they had some
kind of international meeting. It was in January I believe. He and the Canadian representative
got along beautifully. They settled their problem right away. But the State Department people
and the Canadian Department of External Affairs had to worry about the wording of these things.
It meant that they were going to have to stay over a weekend. Ira had no one. But there was a
man who graduated from the University of Iowa and whose thesis was written about the birds of
Iowa. It had been Ira’s bible for years. He called Dr. Anderson up and asked if there wasn’t
some place we could go and get out of this town for the weekend? Dr. Anderson took him up the
Gatineau River. He couldn’t get up to their place which is on the same island that we later built
on. He had a friend who had a cottage up in that area. Ira liked the looks of the country.
Because of that, and through the Andersons, we were able to rent a place which was right next to
their place on Big Island on Blue Sea Lakes.
….Ira had promised the girls that he would take them on a trip in the summer so they could learn
the eastern part of the country. But that didn’t appeal to them. They didn’t want to go
anywhere but up to Blue Sea Lake. We found that the lot next to it was for sale, so we bought
that in 1938. In 1939 we built our house. We’ve been up there every year except the year I
almost died and the year I broke my ankle.
MR. MARSHALL: I’ve seen pictures of it. It’s beautiful.
MRS. GABRIELSON: We have about four acres up there. And the island was divided so that
everyone had lake shore. And the lots go up to a peak.
MR. GABRIELSON: Our part of the island has never been logged. It’s got virgin timber on it.
MR. MARSHALL: When do you go?
MR. GABRIELSON: About the first of July. The ice doesn’t go out of the lake until some time
in May. Last year they told me it was May 15th.
MR. MARSHALL: Did those folks up there have a big party for you up there didn’t they?
MR. GABRIELSON: It was our 60th wedding anniversary.
MRS. GABRIELSON: It was just remarkable. The things that people would go to so much
trouble to do for you.
MR. GABRIELSON: It was all of the people on the island; all of the people we knew. They
had the wing-ding in the biggest house there was which was on the main land. All of the people
on the main land could drive. All of the people on the island had to take a boat.
MRS. GABRIELSON: There wasn’t enough dock space for everybody. Some came by car, and
we divided up the boats and commuted together. They shipped lobster in and had a lobster
dinner for us. Of course we had plenty to drink. After the dinner was over they had fireworks!
They had all of the youngsters coming by lighting them!
MR. MARSHALL: Here’s a picture of the house on Blue Sea Lake up in Quebec. And here’s a
book on Wildlife Refuges. It was done in 1943. There’s this other one on Wildlife Conservation
which was done in 1941.
MR GABRIELSON: There’s another one on wildlife management that I did for the Service.
MR. MARSHALL: Oh and here’s Birds of Oregon. I haven’t seen this one. That was done in
1940.
MR. GABRIELSON: I worked on that one for years. Look at the picture. It’s a painting that
Murie did that up on the Boukshe River on the Olympic Mounds long before it was a Park. He
made a sketch while we were out together. I had collected one. He told me that when I finished
the book, he would do the frontispiece and put that owl on it.
MR. MARSHALL: And here we have it right here. It’s a Northern Spotted Owl, “a rare
inhabitant of the dense spruce and fur forest”. It’s from a painting by O. J. Murie. Gee wiz, this
is beautiful. I’m looking through here and seeing so many nice things. Here’s a bird that has
always intrigued me, the Loon.
MR. GABRIELSON: We have them up at the lake and we like them.
MR. MARSHALL: I think they are my favorite bird.
MR. GABRIELSON: We have them on the lake all of the time.
MR. MARSHALL: They are aptly named aren’t they?
MR. GABRIELSON: They have that laugh that sounds like a maniac almost. At dawn and
sometimes at night they’ll get in the air and fly around the island and call. It’s a different kind of
call.
MR. MARSHALL: It’s a different call. Not a giggle. It is kind of haunting.
MR. GABRIELSON: There are several pair that breed each year up at the lake.
MR. MARSHALL: We haven’t talked about the subject of firearms. What would you say was
your favorite kind of shooting?
MR. GABRIELSON: I grew up with a waterfowl loader. It’s the only real game we had. I did
get a few Prairie Chickens in the last end of them. We still had a few nesting on our place long
after we quit shooting them. We didn’t have any other upland game birds in the country where I
grew up, but we had lots of waterfowl. We were down at the south end of a little chain of lakes
and marshes that came from the Ocabogue Lake. It came right down through the country and we
had lots of geese and lots of ducks.
MR. MARSHALL: I grew up in Minneapolis and around Minnesota as you know. I guess my
favorite kind of hunting was pheasant hunting.
MR. GABRIELSON: There were no pheasants when I was growing up.
MR. MARSHALL: I used to go waterfowl hunting but for some reason my Dad never was
much of a waterfowl hunter. He did like to hunt pheasants. You know, you go along with what
your Dad did. I can remember that in the fall when the season was in, we’d go every weekend.
Then he’d come and get me after school sometimes and we’d go ‘til dark. I guess that’s why I am
so intrigued with the pheasants here in Virginia. One of the things that interests me from when
I’ve hunted with these people from Virginia. Now they are getting accustomed to the pheasants
because we’ve have four seasons. Both of the guys; some of the people from the Game
Commission and others had never hunted pheasants. They reacted so strangely; as did their
dogs! The dogs couldn’t believe what was happening with these pheasants. They were so used
to hunting quail. You know what a pheasant will do! Sometimes if you don’t hit him square and
when he might be wounding but he’s running 45 miles an hour before he hits the ground! This
just threw the dogs all off. They didn’t know what to make of that! It’s quite a bird!
MR. GABRIELSON: I’ve done some pheasant hunting, but I didn’t do it growing up out west.
They had lots of pheasants in Oregon. That’s where they started in about 1890.
MR. MARSHALL: I’m trying to remember now. Our first year we had a two day season. We
killed about 225 here in Virginia. Since then we’ve had a one week season. We’ve been averaging
about 400 a year.
MR. GABRIELSON: Is that mostly in the Shenandoah Valley?
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah. But strangely enough, the second highest county was Loudoun. Page
County was the highest and then Loudoun. That’s going to change I think.
MR. GABRIELSON: There’s got to be grain fields before they’ll do too good.
MR. MARSHALL: The thing that intrigued me out in Page County was that it was very
reminiscent of Iowa and the Dakotas and Minnesota. There were little grain fields and plowed
fields and brushy ditches and some woods. It was also near some water. It was good habitat for
pheasant. It looked like pheasant habitat.
MR. GABRIELSON: That’s why I asked if it was the Shenandoah Valley earlier. It looks like
pheasant country.
MR. MARSHALL: Yeah, and there was some corn too.
MR. GABRIELSON: We see one here once in a while but I think they are escapes from some of
these feeding farms. There was for a long time a shooting place up here, you know, one of those
controlled shoots? They brought in birds and turned them loose. I’ve seen some turkey down
there.
MR. MARSHALL: You know, I’ve never killed a wild turkey. That’s something I want to do.
MR. GABRIELSON: I have.
MR. MARSHALL: I know, darn it! I don’t begrudge you that, I’d just like to do it myself!
This last spring gobbler season I took my daughter Nancy, whom you’ve met. She goes to
school out in Harrisonburg. I arranged for her to be able to go along. I also brought Eric who is
the youngest. We went out and spent the night in Harrisonburg and met with a couple of the
people from the Game Commission who had taken the day off and we went hunting. My
daughter went with those two guys. My son went with me. My son and I didn’t hear anything.
But Max Carpenter who was with Nancy got a 21 ½ pounder with a nine inch beard! It was
really a beautiful bird. What was so thrilling to me was that Nancy was with him when he got it.
She heard him gobble and called. She was a little bit dismayed to see this bird shot, but I think
she was still kind of proud that she was long.
MR. GABRIELSON: I had a funny experience once when we had started home from south
Texas. A friend of mine in Kingsville, which is only about 100 miles, wanted me to stop and go
fishing with him. I had my fishing tackle in the car. He wanted me to take my fly rod. I went
out to a little bit of a pond they had on this little place. There might have been two or three acres
of it. He fished with bait. I said, “I want to see you catch something with that fly rod.” There
are brim and black bass in here. There might have been brim, but I never had one of them strike
it. He was fishing with shrimp. I took a look at that shrimp and picked the nearest colored fly
that I could find. I started to fish and you know, I got three beautiful large mouthed Bass with a
fly. He just didn’t believe it! He said, “What are you using!?” I told him, “Just a dirty little
bunch of feathers!”
MR. MARSHALL: You know what of the hottest fishing lakes in the state right now is called
Lake Anna, which is down here about two hours south west of here. It is the VEPCO [Virginia
Electric Power Company] impoundment for the cooling of their water from the towers. So far
it’s terrific for bass. It slacked off a couple of weeks ago because the bass were on the beds, but
it picking up again. There is a lot of controversy about this because VEPCO says that it’s going
to continue to be good fishing. Our biologists and the Atomic Energy Commission say that this
isn’t going to be the case. When they put those reactors on line the water is going to heat up and
it’s going to destroy all of the microorganisms that the young bass eat. And consequently if they
don’t have anything to eat they aren’t going to make it.
MR. GABRIELSON: That’s right.
MR. MARSHALL: So we heard two sides of the coin. We had an outdoors writers meeting, and
one night we heard our biologist and the next night we heard the VEPCO people. Of course they
painted it all in glowing colors. But the inevitable….
[end of tape 2]